大象传媒

This week's edition of Something Understood is presented by the actress Felicity Finch, who considers how in a play a character's journey can be traced through a coherent pattern of objectives and actions.

The author embeds signposts in the script, directing both actor and audience to pre-planned destinations. Real life, she feels, lacks such clarity. There's a confusion of crossroads, shortcuts, detours and dead-ends.

Felicity draws on the teachings of actress Uta Hagen, a memoir by Dave Eggers and poems by Emily Dickinson and others, as well as music by Tom Waits, the band Free and Franz Liszt, as she considers goal-orientated lives and those that seem to be made up from moment to moment.