OR
An idle frippery or play
ISBN: 979-8285488842
ENTER ONCE MORE INTO RICHARD CRAVEN’S BRISTOL—A RANCID, RHETORICAL HELLSCAPE WHERE VENGEANCE PLAYS TO THE CHEAP SEATS AND NO ONE ESCAPES UNMARKED.
In this third volume of the Bristolian Chronicles—and his only work for the stage—Richard Craven delivers a full-length revenge tragedy in verse, complete with masques, murder, and a cast of the most biblically sordid reprobates ever to grace the theatrical page. At its centre stands Squalor: prologue-speaker, filth-savant, and gleeful herald of the action’s descent. Around him swarm tantrically deluded gurus, demented Tolstoyans, vengeful daughters, and moral pariahs locked in a spiral of ritual humiliation and baroque retribution.
The play is rendered in Craven’s signature iambic bile: a toxic brew of Jacobean intensity, Restoration excess, and Bristolian derangement. Satirical, obscene, and formally virtuosic, The Senseless Counterfeit is a theatrical artefact from a world that has abandoned redemption—and replaced it with performance.
| Bedminster | The site of the Court of Alcinous, a degenerate parody of Homeric hospitality, where thieves, drunks, and minor aristocrats swap tall tales, narcotics and colonic irrigation. |
| Easton | A naturally occurring i.e. undesignated yobbery, with none of the advantages or connections enjoyed by Montypee. |
| Montypee | A designated yobbery, the haunt of drug-addled failsons of Clifton's people who attend all the right fish suppers. |
| Stokes Croft | A festering sink of anarchist utopianism, where reality bends under the weight of unwashed idealists and performance art. |
| Mr Luvvertory | Costa's assistant |
| Slime | gastropodal nonce of Montpelier, sometime cannabis horticulturalist of Stapleton, finally a ghost. A mollusc in both moral and physiological respects, oozing shame and chlorophyll, perished in a manner as sticky as his legacy. |
| The Old Disgrace | Pub at the bottom of Snandrews Road |