It has been several decades since I read this volume of Bennett's plays. Even then, in the mid 1980s, they appeared as if from a different time and place. Flipping through the pages today, the work appears even more alien. Its subject matter in Forty Years On belongs to a generation now so much in the past that its theme of lost innocence itself seems to belong to some scheme of diminished innocence. It's a world whose sepia tinted photos vie with dust motes in eliciting a sense of nostalgia in the dim afternoon sun. The fault, however, is mine, not Bennett's. Vulgarity and brutality conquers all, I suppose. Still, it seems such a distraction, now. ( )

Includes: Getting on, Habeus Corpus, and Enjoy