Blogging about Veronica's Room

Writing, as I've said often enough, is a tough game. But I've always believed that the pleasures and rewards far outweigh the downsides. And that's true of writing a blog. The rewards aren't financial, of course, because I don't take advertisements on this blog, and I don't intend to. The aim here is simply to share some of my enthusiasms. But the rewards are often unexpected, and are particularly gratifying when they take the form of unexpected contacts from readers.

I've had many happy experiences of such contacts, and the other day I received a comment from Tonya on a post dating back five and a half years, no less. It was a post about Ira Levin's play Veronica's Room  and it was a bittersweet moment when I realised that the first comment came from my friend and fellow blogger Maxine Clarke, aka Petrona, whose life was so sadly cut short by cancer.

Unlike Maxine, I'd never had the chance to watch a performance of the play, but Tonya kindly drew my attention to a Youtube video of a performance in which she took part, back in 1994. And I grabbed the first chance I had to watch it. Good old Youtube!

It's a very creepy play indeed (I see from the internet that a few years back, Harvey Weinstein was planning to film it...) and won't be to everyone's taste, for sure. It wasn't a big hit, unlike Levin's Deathtrap, which was more light-hearted, but I find the games that Levin plays with notions of identity truly fascinating. I like crime stories where people are not who they seem, and this is an extremely intriguing example. I'm so glad that Tonya got in touch.