Word: byplaying
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...spend, and he plunges a knife into the kneeling woman's back as if he were an executioner doing his job. For her part, Carmen is an even more explicitly sexual creature than she is usually portrayed. She sings the famous Habanera while engaging in some erotic byplay with a cigar, thrusting it into Don José's mouth at the words "L'amour, I 'amour. " In its total bleakness this is Carmen seen by a man familiar with Alban Berg's operas Wozzeck and Lulu, twin 20th century masterpieces of love, alienation and despair...
...production's first big surprise comes with its Ophelia (Ursula Drabek), whom Cain sees not as a shrinking victim of cruelty and circumstance--the usual interpretation--but as a strong and independent woman. Creating this Ophelia takes imaginative line-reading, a good deal of un-Shakespearean byplay that never made it into a script, and some outright cheating--for instance, an extra exchange of "Ophelia!" and "NO!" as Polonius tries to force his daughter to tell the King about Hamlet's visit to her chamber...
...jolly good fun, with some wonderful parody of Bunker Hill and American moviedom. But there's a bitter edge beneath the verbal byplay, a sardonic vision reminiscent of Catch-22. If Wood disrupts the humor and flow with the prolonged dispute between the workers and Bean, it's because he has a point to make. War or moviemaking is nothing but a chaotic nightmare; and while some madman director-general barks orders from a crane, several hundred lowly paid extras, be they Irish soldiers in the British Army in 1775 or Irish extras in a British movie...