Word: plantagenet
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...spleen: that D. H. Lawrence would be among her major targets for setting his Lady Chatterley's Lover at the Sitwell estate in Derbyshire and modeling the novel's war-maimed, cuckolded baronet after the elder of her brothers, Sir Osbert. "My brother," noted the Plantagenet-descended poetess, "is a baronet, and he fought like a tiger for his country in the First World War. I don't know why Lawrence should have done this to Osbert, who never harmed...
John Wolfson has constructed himself a fantasy, or more precisely, a cosmology, a huge private joke of a universe which he has thrown rather diffidently onto the Loeb experimental stage and asked an audience to enjoy. That is what strikes one first about Dr. Plantagenet, the sheer nerve of the play. Shaw's Back to Methuselah seems by contrast extraordinarily limited in scope...
Wolfson's is an untidy universe wearily administered by a hierarchy of bureaucratic deities who survey the passing millennia with an admixture of cynicism and occasional sadistic delight. One of the functionaries is Plantagenet himself, who has programmed (in his own image) a self-operating machine which is called fate and which actually runs the earth. The "tertiary spiritual leader" nominally responsible for the earth, the official locally designated "God," appears here as Nathan Weltschmertz, an amiable, blundering fellow whose ambition to realize a personal utopia the machine continually frustrates...
...Weltschmertz becomes "sick"; he assists two lost souls to break through the barrier of earth into the void. The souls, Hector and Gnatalia (in a vague way Adam and Eve figures), pollute the atmosphere of the void; so much so that Rex Regis, a vice-President, must call upon Plantagenet to psychoanalyze Nathan, and persuade Him that He can in fact control His planet in His own way. And that the Doctor does, with what an earlier school of reviewing would call many riotous consequences...
...technical matters. Why, after all, should lost souls produce a kind of "spiritual fallout"? Why should Nathan's metaphysics be so simple-minded that He cannot grasp the mechanics of good and evil on His earth? A lack of precision, a lack simply of detail, reduces much of Dr. Plantagenet to situation comedy in a wild setting. Its fascination is undeniable, but it derives far more from one's desire to learn more about a weirdly built cosmos than from any inherent appeal in a rash of conventionally unconventional ideas...