صخرة الرعد

by Robert Ardrey, روبرت أردري, مرسي سعد الدين (Translator)

The action passes in a lighthouse on Lake Michigan. Charleston, the keeper, has taken a job there to flee from a detestable world. Opposing Charleston's pessimism, Streeter, his friend, says he is giving up his job to become an active member of society again. Streeter believes our world can be brought out of its chaos if people do something about it. Filled with this determination, he leaves to become an aviator. Charleston retreats further into a fantastic world of his own building. The people of this world are half a dozen of the 60 who were shipwrecked 90 years ago. Believing that "Mankind's got one future in the past," Charleston breathes life into these creatures of his imagination. They live again on the stage. As he talks to them we see passengers as they really were, each seeking sanctuary from a disturbed Europe, running away from life, yet needing the same hope and strength as Charleston himself. Charleston's sincerity convinces these creatures that he really has the courage to lead his fellowmen into a better world, and in this faith they are content to die again. Inspired by their confidence, the lighthouse-keeper returns to useful work, determined to create a new order out of the chaos of the old."

Genres: Plays

Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Robert Ardrey was born in the South Side of Chicago in 1908. He attended the University of Chicago to study biology, but became the writing protegé of Thornton Wilder. He graduated in the midst of the Great Depression and supported himself with odd jobs while he wrote under Wilder's watchful eye. His first play, Star Spangled, opened on Broadway in 1935.

He continued to have plays produced on Broadway. His most famous, Thunder Rock, became a sensation in wartime London, and is now regarded as an international classic. Ardrey's plays caught the attention of MGM executive Samuel Goldwyn; in 1938 Ardrey moved to Hollywood, where he would become MGM's highest paid writer. He is credited with over a dozen films, including The Three Musketeers (1948, with Gene Kelly), The Wonderful Country (1959, with Robert Mitchum), and Khartoum (1966, directed by Basil Dearden, starring Charlton Heston and Laurence Olivier) for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Screenplay.

In the 1950s, increasingly disenchanted with Hollywood, Ardrey travelled to Africa to write a series of articles. This trip renewed his interest in human origins, and he returned to his academic training in the sciences. In 1956 he moved with his wife and two sons to Geneva, and spent the next five years travelling and researching in Eastern and Southern Africa, conducting research for what would become his first scientific work, African Genesis (1961).

African Genesis and Ardrey's subsequent books were massively popular and deeply controversial. They overturned core assumptions of the social sciences and led to a revolution in thinking about human nature. Fundamentally Ardrey argued that human behavior was not entirely socially determined, rather evolutionarily inherited instincts help determine behavior and format large-scale social phenomena. Subsequent science has largely vindicated his hypotheses.

Robert Ardrey is the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the inaugural Sidney Howard Memorial Award, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and received an Academy Award Nomination for best screenplay for his film Khartoum. Time magazine named African Genesis the most notable book of the 1960s.

For more see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_...

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's so good and short.

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating play written prior to the United States entry into WWII. Charleston, the protagonist, is a former journalist who covered the Spanish Civil War. Disgusted by the horrible things that people do to each other, he takes a job as a lighthouse keeper at an isolated lighthouse in the Great Lakes, where he only sees people once a month, when supplies are delivered. He wants to be separate from the world. In his solitude, he brings to life (in his mind) some of the people who died in when their ship sank in a storm near the lighthouse back in 1849. In the play they take shape, and assume personalities that he assigns them based on the log in the lighthouse. One of the characters, Captain Joshua, although a figment of his imagination, calls him out for creating superficial and stereotypical people, rather than ones with histories and problems similar to today. In rethinking them, Charleston realizes that isolation in the midst of world turmoil is unrewarding and keeps him from living a fully human life. When the supply plane returns at the end, he leaves as well, going back into taking an active part in the world.