Word: edwardians
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...host of Masterpiece Theatre. For millions of PBS viewers, Cooke was like the guest they always hoped to meet at a party -- charming, informed but never overbearing as he steered them urbanely through such series as Upstairs, Downstairs, I, Claudius and The Jewel in the Crown, discoursing on Edwardian manners, the English public school or life in the sunlit empire...
...lack of it is why the east front of the palace -- the backdrop to the Changing of the Guard -- looks like a bank that got too big for its boots. He specialized in bland, thick architectural effects coupled with the sort of mingy "good taste" decoration later imitated in Edwardian hotels...
...news shots (of the King with his horse trainer or Amelia Earhart being mobbed at the London airport) and even a gangster-movie poster of Edward G. Robinson. No American or European artist at the time used such sources with as much aplomb. Scorning British good taste and the Edwardian artist's role as the groom of new aristocrats -- a task he left to what he called the "wriggle and chiffon" school of portraiture, led by the American expatriate John Singer Sargent -- Sickert went down a few class notches, looking for a virile, demotic way of painting that did something...
...excuse for conversation. In Shaw's theater, verbal sparring may be a more socially acceptable pleasure than sex, but it is hardly an innocent one, as its main appeal seems to be outdoing and occasionally humiliating another person. The characters' drive to manipulate each other through ideas reflects Edwardian bourgeois society's obsession with class and the power of appearances...
Especially notable are the performances of Derek Smith as Bentley, the neurotic upper-class twit, and Stephanie Roth as the energetic yet graceful Hypatia. The stage, designed as a summerhouse with a marble fountain, captures that Edwardian spirit of gracious and confining domestic life, complete with a back wall made of a metal grille. For the Tarleton family, domestic life is truly a gilded cage...