Word: elizabethan
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...gets off the ground, but that's the beauty--and the risk--of a live performance, And the infrequent bumbles are more than made up for by the group's strongest pieces. One standout is the Melrod-penned Shakespearean soap opera called "Most Grievous Hospital," which is rendered in Elizabethan rhyming couplets from the introduction by a character named Gossip ("Enjoy the play, friends, Gossip now be gone. I'll change my costume quickly and return anon.") It continues through a brief and purposefully confusing ploy of divorces and jealousy--regular General Hospital fare--("Oh, woe, that I should unaraesthetized...
...Constable was by temperament incapable of reaching for Turner's ever mutating rhetoric of sublime effects. His work was more staid, more modest, less conspicuously "inventive." Painting, he considered, was "a branch of natural philosophy, of which my pictures are but the experiments." From Nicholas Milliard's Elizabethan miniatures through Rupert Brooke's pastoral poetry, a deep love of the particulars of landscape, nose thrust in the hedgerow, has always been central to English culture. No wonder, then, that Constable's following is large and loyal. His landscape is just what the English feel nostalgic...
...coin from passing through the hands of so many directors. Although it's been 16 years since its original minting, this weekend's Dunster House performance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hasn't lost its edge. The innovation of two Shakespearean anti-heroes on center stage, the stark contrast between Elizabethan and modern language--and the themes of the finality of death, the role of fate and the insignificance of human life--are not dulled even after many staging. Director Roger Kaplan's interpretation, while not radically different from others,' lands "heads up" with a lively presentation...
Another trap in Stoppard's play is the confining of rich, mock-Elizabethan dialogue to a spare, absurdist setting--as critics have pointed out, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern draws heavily from Samuel Beckett's style. But director Kaplan perhaps tips the scales too heavily toward the absurd tradition. The stark stage, the sparse furniture are all there, and rightly so. But the Shakespearean tradition is just as important: Stoppard includes sizable chunks from Hamlet, and his own words show a penchant for language tricks...
...windows, for example, make good use of the unusual features of the library. The audience--including a group sitting on burlap sacking on the floor--is so close that the duelling actors brush their knees occasionally, drawing them into the action with an intimacy which characterized drama during the Elizabethan and Stuart eras...