Word: danishness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Director Tim Foley has transformed this space into a surprisingly apt theatre. The intimacy of the room emphasizes the claustrophobic nature of the Danish court. While the limitations of the theatre quickly become obvious (the ghost is a spotlight accompanied by clashing orchestral chords, for instance), they are minimal...
Foley takes liberties with the usual portrayals of Shakespeare's characters, creating a new sense of politics in the Danish court. David Bottorf as Polonius is anything but a doddering old fool -- he's an overbearing and controlling father and courtier. When Polonius sells the king and queen he knows the cause of Hamlet's lunacy, it's more a command to listen than a plea for audience...
Holsteins are hardworking Danish cows who make it possible for well-disciplined families to earn a living from ground not good enough to grow corn or soybeans. Dairying is not a sentimental line of work, however, and a cow's productivity chart hangs by the stall where she can see it: she knows that when her output declines she's dead meat; retraining will not be an option. Dogs and cats, when hunting became too hard, retrained as house pets, but a large hoofy animal that chews its own vomit will never be welcome in the American home...
...STRONG SUBSURface themes of Smilla's Sense of Snow, the fine 1993 thriller by Peter Hoeg, a Danish novelist then new to America, was a slyly expressed contempt for what the author saw as his country's bourgeois self-satisfaction. This much relished contempt and cheerfully malign slyness are the driving forces of Hoeg's first novel, The History of Danish Dreams (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 356 pages; $24), which has now been issued in the U.S. That said, there's not much similarity between the two novels. Smilla has a powerful narrative flow; Dreams is a lumpish absurdity that fuddles...
This extreme awkwardness of construction makes Dreams, which belabors the smugness and provincialism of Danish society from feudal times to the present, seem far longer than it is. There are passages, not murky but mightily centrifugal, in which the reader's eyes slide off the page. And in something like equal number, or a bit more, there are set pieces, two or three or several dozen pages long, that are among the funniest satirical sketches seen in years...