Fuenteovejuna by Lope de Vega – you find thousands of reviews of plays and books from The Greatest Books of All Time and other sites, plus notes on films from The New York Times’ Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made and other lists on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html

 

Fuenteovejuna by Lope de Vega – you find thousands of reviews of plays and books from The Greatest Books of All Time and other sites, plus notes on films from The New York Times’ Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made and other lists on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html

 

6 out of 10

 

This play somehow fell into my lap…of course it did not, it is just a manner of speaking, and sometime a change is required

 

Stefan Klein https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-science-of-happiness-how-our-brains.html is the fabulous author of The Science of Happiness, in which he argues for the need to change, also explained under The Lasagna Effect by Harvard Professor Tal Ben Shahar: he likes lasagna, but not all day, every day

There are some aspects of this play which I liked, the people of the village of Fuenteovejuna prove to be brave, although in the first part, I was thinking that this monster, Fernán Gómez de Guzmán, will eventually win

 

-          Fernán Gómez de Guzmán is a sort of Orange Baboon of the medieval times

 

Kingsley Amis https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/01/memoirs-by-kingsley-amis-author-of-take.html had the best analysis, under The “Checkoff formula: you take a lot of characters, all miserable because of something they won't do, and let them talk without influencing each other for three acts, and at the last moment you introduce some arbitrary calamity, or some proposed change like a return to Petrograd or a holiday in the Cry-mere, which you know won't make any difference to any of them, and then you go on for ten minutes or so after the thing should have stopped even by your own standards, to show how delicate and unemphatic your art is”

This can be applied to this play- this Guzman is as repellent as they come, he is a commander, ergo he has power over the others – and you can look at the White House, Kremlin to see what that does even today – and he abuses it, he likes this young woman, she has to be his, or else there will be punishment and pain

 

The Epstein files come to mind – or the Trump-Epstein as Jimmy Kimmel rightly calls them – we can see what people with money, influence did, and how they got away with it, Andrew – nicknamed The Cunt by his guards – Mandelson and a few others are going to pay, but many in the US will go free, especially Trump

This medieval gangster is about to rape this woman, but the man who loves her comes from nearby, takes the arbalette and forces the villain to move away, threatening to kill him, if he does not listen, but then Guzman decides that this girl will not be hers, she will be ‘for the troops’, meaning she will be raped by all the soldiers

Anton Chekhov was one of the greatest authors of all time  https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-marriage-proposal-by-anton-chekhov.html and he had this observation – ‘if you show this gun in the first act, then you need to use it’, maybe he said by the second act, I do not remember and anyway, it is there, on the net

 

Now for my standard closing of the note with a question, and invitation – I am on Goodreads as Realini Ionescu, at least for the moment, if I keep on expressing my views on Orange Woland aka TACO, it may be a short-lived presence

Also, maybe you have a good idea on how we could make more than a million dollars with this https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html – as it is, this is a unique technique, which we could promote, sell, open the Oscars show with or something and then make lots of money together, if you have the how, I have the product, I just do not know how to get the benefits from it, other than the exercise per se

 

 There is also the small matter of working for AT&T – this huge company asked me to be its Representative for Romania and Bulgaria, on the Calling Card side, which meant sailing into the Black Sea wo meet the US Navy ships, travelling to Sofia, a lot of activity, using my mother’s two bedrooms flat as office and warehouse, all for the grand total of $250, raised after a lot of persuasion to the staggering $400…with retirement ahead, there are no benefits, nothing…it is a longer story, but if you can help get the mastodont to pay some dues, or have an idea how it can happen, let me know

 

As for my role in the Revolution that killed Ceausescu, a smaller Mao, there it is http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html

 

Some favorite quotes from To The Hermitage and other works

 

‘Fiction is infinitely preferable to real life...As long as you avoid the books of Kafka or Beckett, the everlasting plot of fiction has fewer futile experiences than the careless plot of reality...Fiction's people are fuller, deeper, cleverer, more moving than those in real life…Its actions are more intricate, illuminating, noble, profound…There are many more dramas, climaxes, romantic fulfillment, twists, turns, gratified resolutions…Unlike reality, all of this you can experience without leaving the house or even getting out of bed…What's more, books are a form of intelligent human greatness, as stories are a higher order of sense…As random life is to destiny, so stories are to great authors, who provided us with some of the highest pleasures and the most wonderful mystifications we can find…Few stories are greater than Anna Karenina, that wise epic by an often foolish author…’