Word: anouilh
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...radically altered and energized the traditional dynamic of the stage. It was no longer simply the place where people spoke; it was where not speaking could be far more suggestive, dangerous, theatrical, eloquent. Like Beckett, he renounced the flossy rhetoric of such postwar playwrights as Christopher Fry and Jean Anouilh for a back-to-basics starkness - a two-men-on-a-stage simplicity that Aeschylus would have admired. In its citation, the Swedish Academy said Pinter "restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles...
...Broadway, French dramatists were all the rage: the plays of Jean Giraudoux and Samuel Beckett had good runs, as did the musicals "La Plume de ma tante" and "Irma la douce"; the young Hepburn entranced New York audiences as Colette's Gigi and Jean Anouilh's Ondine. Novels from Germany, Italy, Japan - pretty much any nation the Allies had conquered - were must reading for the intelligentsia. Jean-Paul Sartre was so famous he was parodied in Hepburn's Paris frolic "Funny Face...
...verbal affair, but the first few scenes establish a questionable tone. Mike Weidman '02, who plays the Chorus, is loud, clear and expressive, but so smarmy as he introduces the play that one would expect him to be quite knowingly introducing a bad Saturday Night Live sketch rather than Anouilh's searching parable. Beatrice Kitzinger '03, Caitlin Harrington '03 and Liz Clinkenbeard '01, as Antigone, her sister Ismene, and her nurse, respectively, suffer from a similar problem in their early exchanges: they belabor the irony of remarks about Antigone's future with such self-conscious intensity that the production threatens...
...power that the production evolves, nonetheless, seems to belong almost exclusively to the actors. There is no lighting, no sound, no set; the only real evidence of staging are the lazy circles that the actors draw around each other as they pace the grass of the courtyard. And while Anouilh's script can certainly support a minimalist production, this one struggles to establish any sense of atmosphere. It is difficult to forget that one is in the middle of Adams House. The costuming is confusing: most costumes are appropriately spare, but they range incongruously from a generic pink Elizabethan dress...
Additionally, elitist though it may be to say, performing the play in English instead of French automatically robs some of the truest life of Anouilh's words. Sawyer has not done a tremendous amount to reinvigorate the script and turn her production from a fine staged reading into an evocative drama. This Antigone is rich in ideas but never comes around to engaging the senses...