Word: byron
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Howard Brenton calls his play Bloody Poetry "the celebration of a magnificent failure." Based on the relationship between Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord George Byron, the play explores their frustrated attempt to live utopian lives. However, The Leland Center's production fails to convince the audience that their failure is worth celebrating...
Bysshe (Christopher Shea) and Byron (Jonathan Rigby) meet for the first time in the summer of 1816. Emigres to Switzerland, they seek an escape from "the turgid cesspool" of England. Still a young idealist, Bysshe is slightly in awe of the older, cynical Lord Byron, already world-weary at the age of 28. Bysshe believes he can transform the world with words. But his growing disillusionment with this possibility torments...
...effect of his poetic ambitions on those around him. He leaves his wife and children and neglects his lover, Mary Godwin (Catharine Gibson). Even when he receives the news of his first wife's suicide, the accidental rhyme "found drowned" in the letter affects him more than his loss. Byron taunts him, "You shred and tear lives around you as much as I, the cynic, the libertine." The older poet admits to his share of irresponsibility, leaving a child by Claire Clairemont (Kate Bennis) to die in a convent...
...both director and actor, Rigby robs the play of much of its natural energy. The play's biggest disappointment is his portrayal of Lord Byron. Shea's Bysshe quivers in his presence like a nervous schoolboy, but Byron as Rigby plays him doesn't seem to merit this idolatry. He appears middle-aged and harmless, although the poet was only 28 at the time. It is hard to imagine him climbing drainpipes after rich young heiresses and sleeping his way across Europe...
Vice President Al Gore '69 was administered theoath of office by Supreme Court Justice Byron R.White...