Respecting the Dursleys( was:Re: Hi everyone -- banning the books)

[Bruce Alan Wilson]

No: HPFGUIDX 159661

Yes, we laughed at Dudley at the beginning, but that doesn't mean that we won't
feel sympathy for him by the end.

Anyone here familiar with Dylan Thomas' "Under Milkwood"?   He wrote it as a
pilot for a BBC radio series about a small town in Wales where everyone is
crazy--some are just mildly eccentric, at least two are right over the edge, and
most are somewhere in between.  He died before BBC could pick it up or reject
it, so how the series might have developed nobody will ever know.  It is a
staple of "readers' theater" as a 'play for voices'.  By doubling the enormous
cast of characters can be done with six to eight performers more-or-less evenly
divided between the sexes, and one needs very little in the way of costumes,
sets, props, etc.

I know that this seems off-topic, but bear with me.

Early in the play there is a character called "Bessie Bighead" who is depicted
as laying flowers on the grave of Gomer Owen who 'kissed her once by the pigsty
when she wasn't looking, and never did it again although she was looking all the
time.'  Now, that line always gets a laugh.  Later in the play we learn more
about Bessie.  She's what we today would call Down Syndrome or something
similar, and Gomer Owen kissed her because his friends dared him to.  At this
point, the audience always gasps, realizing what they had been laughing at
earlier.  

I suspect that JKR may do something similar with Dudley and his parents.


BAW