Catherine has spent years caring for her brilliant but unstable father, Robert. When he dies she has more than grief to deal with: there's her estranged sister, Claire, and Hal, a former student of her father's who hopes to find valuable work in the 103 notebooks that Robert left behind. And a further problem: how much of her father's madness - or genius - will Catherine inherit? Gwyneth Paltrow starred in this Pultizer Prize-winning play which opened at the Donmar Warehouse in 2001.
Proof is the winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.One of the most acclaimed plays of the 1999-2000 season, Proof is a work that explores the unknowability of love as much as it does the mysteries of science.It focuses on Catherine, a young woman who has spent years caring for her father, Robert, a brilliant mathematician in his youth who was later unable to function without her help. His death has brought into her midst both her sister, Claire, who wants to take Catherine back to New York with her, and Hal, a former student of Catherine's father who hopes to find some hint of Robert's genius among his incoherent scribblings. The passion that Hal feels for math both moves and angers Catherine, who, in her exhaustion, is torn between missing her father and resenting the great sacrifices she made for him. For Catherine has inherited at least a part of her father's brilliance -- and perhaps some of his instability as well. As she and Hal become attracted to each other, they push at the edges of each other's knowledge, considering not only the unpredictability of genius but also the human instinct toward love and trust.
A deeply moving, tenderly insightful play about friendship, memory, and the small moments that can change the course of our lives forever. Over one fateful summer, an unlikely friendship develops between Diana, a fiercely iconoclastic artist and single mom, and Alice, a free-spirited yet naive young housewife. As the Bicentennial is celebrated across the country, these two young women in Ohio navigate motherhood, ambition, and intimacy, and help each other discover their own independence.
How successful is Dickens in his portrayal of women? Dickens has been represented (along with William Blake and D.H. Lawrence) as one who championed the life of the emotions often associated with the "feminine." Yet some of his most important heroines are totally submissive and docile. Dickens, of course, had to accept the conventions of his time. It is obvious, argues Holbrook, that Dickens idealized the father-daughter relationship, and indeed, any such relationship that was unsexual, like that of Tom Pinch and his sister--but why? Why, for example, is the image of woman so often associated with death, as in Great Expectations? Dickens's own struggles over relationships with women have been documented, but much less has been said about the unconscious elements behind these problems. Using recent developements in psychoanalytic object-relations theory, David Holbrook offers new insight into the way in which the novels of Dickens--particularly Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Great Expectations--both uphold emotional needs and at the same time represent the limits of his view of women and that of his time.
