Orson Welles, in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, makes a sweeping statement that Shakespeare did not write true tragedies. They were melodramas. Now what is the distinction? Welles adds that real tragedies were what the Greeks wrote: there is only one Oedipus Rex. It is as if tragedies occur incomprehensibly, yet they could have been avoided if...

News reports are just badly written prose. Surely the point is not embedded in the defining but in the entertaining of some inner need. Someone might argue that 'Macbeth' has a poor plot but it is there on the jagged profiles of that paltry outline where tingling sensations and unseemly compulsions are fully explored. The hinge on the turning mood is verily the deed - the murder. Being discussed here is material which some might call 'weighty' and others 'noir'.

It has all the contextuality that one would ever need to keep a psychoanalyst happy for life.

There is an almost 'rational' conflux of 'irrational' acts leading to the catharsis, in . Whatever might be the outcome the salient point is that we are dealing with facts.

Take 'The Great Gatsby' for instance. The whole story collapses if Jay Gatsby is not the obsessively persistent type in his search for happiness. Instead this self deluded man, who thinks he went to Oxford, insists that Daisy loves him back, despite herself. He does not accept with a simple shrug that things have changed, in some too unsubtle ways. Just as he is thinking yet another long sentence - a bullet enters his head. The crazy thing in all this is how anyone who has ever been anywhere can so easily guess; "- what preyed on Gatsby -".

Oedipus had been warned but unfortunately for him, the oracles are ambiguous, in avoiding one, he runs straight into another and calamities ensue. Unlike Gatsby, Oedipus lives on but he has been blinded. He has become pitiful. Roles are given accordingly to actors who best fit the pathos. And there are always those willing to play Iago.

There are high commendations indeed to dramatists who would conjure, even just for a little time, some noble illusions. A girl is cut in half and rabbits ejaculate from a hat. To make storytelling seem easy cannot be that easy.