The Muse Sneezes and Other Plays

Of The Muse Sneezes, the poet and critic Peter Porter wrote: “The Muse Sneezes is a play in which a trinity (or triumvirate) of actors acts out the general malfunctioning of the human race. ‘Big Hat’, ‘Luey’ and ‘the Muse’ live in one room, eternally confused about time, language, alcohol and society. Appropriately, the Muse is the writer and breadwinner but isn’t able to speak. Her two partners spend the time trying to overcome her writer’s block. The disputes of these three (the Muse mimes her responses) are as funny as they are disturbing. Caroline Rehder’s play diagnoses human dilemmas while analysing the words they are founded on. Utterly original and yet immediately recognisable, The Muse Sneezes is language on the run from despair.”

This is a collection of upbeat, offbeat, funny plays that use mime, dialogue, slapstick and repartee to take a fresh look at old problems. Two of the plays are unusual in making non-speaking roles as significant as speaking roles. This mimics the difficulty of communication. In many of the plays there are roles that are neither gender or age specific, making them accessible to a wide range of actors. 

The plays have been performed in fringe venues in Edinburgh, Berne, Amsterdam, Lausanne, London and Oxford. The Arts Committee at St John’s College, Oxford invited a play to be performed there as part of their programme in 2010. In 2020, Mouse, translated into French by Sonia Menoud, was performed in Fribourg in Switzerland with funding from the arts council of Fribourg.