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PROSPERO AT BREAKFAST copy-1 PROSPERO AT BREAKFAST

by Alan Wickes


"Still, you tame the matinee; gradually

the sniggering kids grow hushed, and by the end

they clap and cheer to set an old magician free."


 
Alan Wickes' Prospero at Breakfast relies on the reader's cultural knowledge to point its argument. What an imaginative triumph to locate the exiled magician-duke not on stage, but to place the actor, with his "rehearsed panache", on tour in his digs.....The ironies of this contrast are pointed by the use of precise detail: so Prospero's cell is a "spruced-up" Laura Ashley room and his magic the breakfast squeezing of "two cups from one tea bag". (Roger Elkin /author, Blood Brothers: New and Selected Poems)

 

 

 

 

 
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