Word: backdrop
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...forgotten?understandable as that criticism may be in view of the pressing problems back on earth. It was, too, a moment that symbolized man's wondrous capacity for questing, then conquering, then questing yet again for something just beyond his reach. But the black vastness that served as a backdrop for the two astronauts' walk on the moon also was a reminder of something else. Stargazer, now star-reacher, man inhabits a smallish planet of an ordinary sun in a garden-variety galaxy that occupies the tiniest corner of a universe whose scope is beyond comprehension...
...curtain raiser, appropriately titled Silence, presents two men and a woman (Anthony Bate, Norman Rodway, Frances Cuka) seated in the disembodied setting of a hazily mirrored stage and backdrop. They all have monologues to recite about loneliness and remembered passion. But each monologue is fragmented, interspersed with the others, phrased, sometimes from the point of view of age, sometimes of youth-and always arranged around tense, troubled silences. Under Peter Hall's sensitive direction, it soon becomes evident that Pinter is using these jagged aural spaces to signify not only the passage of time but also the distance between...
Eugene Lee's attractive set emphasizes the duplicity in the situation. With a photo-collage of the Easter Uprising for a backdrop, the rough-hewn wooden staging has been built around a series of burlesque devices: there is a set of three doors to facilitate confusion, lots of ramps and runways that bring the actors right up to their audience, and a piano at dead center to give the whole thing some stability. In short, this juxtaposition of the tragic and the comic pinpoints the mentality of a people who have survived politics (both their side's and the other...
...acquired at Eau-bonne, 15 miles outside Paris. The young maverick made the most of the opportunity. He let his playful brush and imagination run rampant over walls, doors and ceilings. By the time Ernst was finished, he had transformed the small stone villa into a uniquely hallucinatory backdrop, hi these surroundings, the founders of Surrealism-Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Andre Masson, Michel Leiris, Robert Desnos and, of course, the Eluards-met and dreamed aloud the bizarre fantasies that would reshape much 20th century...
Unfortunately, once he has provided the detailed backdrop, Ivory and his co-scenarist, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, neglect most of the objects in the foreground. A face outlined here, a figure there, and they consider the task completed. It is not. The guru and the singer may be alive; the rest are actors sitting for sketches with only the vaguest dimension or purpose. Moreover, lines like "I feel so trapped. No one here understands me" tend to mock the film's painfully straight face...