Do3 - 19 Dec. The Royal Game

[aeolium]

Meanwhile, putting the text back on the bookshelf, I happened to see this passage quite by chance (my rough translation):

"As a way of occupying myself, I would recite or reconstruct as well as I could everything I had once learned by heart: popular songs and nursery rhymes, passages from Homer learned at school, paragraphs from the Code civil. Then I tried to do calculations, adding and dividing any old numbers. But in this vacuum, my memory could retain nothing. The same thought kept slipping in: what do they know? What did I say yesterday, what must I say next time?"

He then goes on to describe the claustrophobic oppressiveness of his room.

So that SZ's answer!

Well, that text was not reproduced in the play, ff :)

But why could his memory retain nothing? He obviously had an exceptional memory as he was able to remember all the moves of the games in his book subsequently and use that knowledge to defeat the world champion. Are we supposed to think that only the extraordinary oppression of his circumstances created these powers of recall?

Sorry - the plot failed to convince me, though I enjoyed the play.

[french frank]

But why could his memory retain nothing? He obviously had an exceptional memory as he was able to remember all the moves of the games in his book subsequently and use that knowledge to defeat the world champion. Are we supposed to think that only the extraordinary oppression of his circumstances created these powers of recall?

Sorry - the plot failed to convince me, though I enjoyed the play.

Well, it's not for me to defend a plot which fails to convince you!

However, I think the partial explanation lies in the fact that there was a much more immediate anxiety which kept pushing its way into his mind. That definitely had resonances for me. There was a time when I was going to a lot of troublesome evening meetings (chairing them) during the week and inevitably I couldn't sleep when I got home, going over and over the very stressful business. What I discovered was - the Rubik cube. If I did it for half an hour or so when I got home it drove everything out of my mind. It wasn't that I was an expert but it required/compelled absolute concentration (and took me about five minutes each time, rather than the 30 seconds which kids needed). It seemed to break the repetitive chain of thoughts. So for me that worked perfectly and I wondered whether Zweig found the same with his own chess manuel.

As for failing to convince: I had a friend who used to try her hand at fiction. Her constant wail was that people always criticised as 'unconvincing/unlikely' the bits which had really happened to her while never questioning the things she'd made up

[tony yyy]

An interesting point about the plot being convincing or not. How many plays have completely convincing plots and how much does it matter? In this case, I wasn't convinced either by the idea of Dr B being kept in solitary confinement in an otherwise empty hotel for several months or by him becoming such an expert in chess in that time. Nevertheless, I found it an effective drama with a particularly good performance from Paul Rhys.

[aeolium]

An interesting point about the plot being convincing or not. How many plays have completely convincing plots and how much does it matter?

I suppose it partly depends upon what kind of play it is - obviously a surreal or mythopoeic play would be different from a more naturalistic one but there should still be some internal coherence. What I found unconvincing was the psychological development of Dr B as it came across in the radio production (though as ff says, that may have been more effective in the novella) and that was surely one of the main points of the story.