Word: darnley
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From the loft's cavernous elevator emerge some of the play's best performances. Sissy Bemiss Darnley (J. Smith Cameron), Nan's horrid daughter, rages through the studio proclaiming with monosyllabic hillarity--"It's hip, it's hot, it's space, it's art, it's a loft." Marcus (Thomas Derrah) and Katrin Dowling (Francine Torres, Ma Ubu of "Ubu Rock"), a pair of kooky magazine publishers and the token true hipsters of the production, persuade Alex to photograph their daughter Guernica's sixth birthday party...
...brother James Stewart, Earl of Moray. Musgrave, the composer and the wife of Artistic Director Mark, also wrote the libretto. Her story crackles with emotional tension: between Mary, young, lovely and impulsive; James, who craves power; the hotheaded soldier, the Earl of Both well; and the weak courtier, Lord Darnley, her cousin who becomes her husband...
...wise and willful womanhood is inspired. She comes to Captain Shotover's nautically decorated household to visit her friend Hesione, who schemes to save Ellie from marriage to a rich old industrialist. In the bargain she receives the heartbreaking knowledge that her hero of brief acquaintance, the swashbuckling Marcus Darnley, is really, and only, her friend's husband Hector. As Ellie's meddling friend Hesione and her sister Ariadne, two other Matchmaker women--Patricia Falkenhain and Joanne Hamlin respectively--are aptly bewitching, and more convincing than they were as Dolly Levi and Mrs. Molloy. Both emit what Hector calls...
Part of what makes it all so intriguing is that comparing the various stories has become a kind of historical scrabble. Was Mary's husband, Darnley, for instance, a womanizing lech as Vivat has it? Or was he a homosexual as the movie has it? (He seems to have been the former.) The popular version of the story, accepted by those raving romantics Schiller and Donizetti, portrays Mary as a high-brogue Joan of Arc and Elizabeth as the Wicked Witch of the West. The new versions, sometimes wildly inaccurate in other ways, do at least correct that longstanding...
Antonia Fraser's approach to such goings-on is the one advocated by 19th Century Historian James Froude: "To look wherever we can through the eyes of contemporaries, from whom the future was concealed." With such handling, events achieve a fresh plausibility; Mary's behavior with Darnley and Bothwell, for example, becomes humanly understandable. Historic perspectives are foreshortened-a most notable defect in Miss Fraser's acerbic portrait of Queen Elizabeth. Nonetheless, the author marshals her evidence generously enough to allow for differing interpretations and briskly clears away the "cobwebs of fantasy" that have attached themselves...