Word: hamleted
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...vast nation. There is--though it remains limited. Two weeks ago, I joined an American delegation from the Atlanta-based Carter Center to observe a township election of government officials and People's Congress representatives in China's Sichuan province. When we arrived in Banqiao (pop. 1,987), a hamlet of thatch-roof houses and muddy roads, the villagers had gathered on the basketball court of a local school to elect three representatives to the township. People's Congress. There wasn't a lot of choice: four candidates, all picked by the party, for three seats...
...desire to hunt for Stoppard's touch is understandable. The playwright, who was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 and educated in India and England, catapulted to fame with a different Shakespearean work: the 1967 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, an existential reimagining of two characters from Hamlet. Since then his work has been known for its wordplay and highbrow subject matter--such as chaos theory in Arcadia, or the life of poet A.E. Housman in The Invention of Love, now running in London. Many of his plays have been criticized for their emotional inaccessibility, but, says Stoppard...
Though he confesses he was initially reluctant to return to Shakespeare, Stoppard says he has been bowled over by the power of the Bard--and the theater--ever since his "first, deep" experience seeing Hamlet: "It alerted you. It jumped you into the central truth about theater, which is that it's an event and not a text." This, he is convinced, is why theater will endure and why he continues to produce a play every few years (of his next he will say only "19th century" and "Russia...
...played all the great queens: Cleopatra, Gertrude in Hamlet, Queen Victoria in the 1997 film Mrs. Brown. She has great swaths of Shakespeare locked in her brain: all of Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night's Dream and "probably most of Measure for Measure." So, for British actor Judi Dench, figuring out how to inhabit the role of Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love was no great mystery. "I thought she would be a commanding person," says Dench, who is herself a rather gracious person, and all of 5-ft. 1-in. tall. "I thought that...
...certainly not immune to the gray cloud of misery that has descended onto our little hamlet. I, too, have found myself in the doldrums during the past few days, and after one particularly jarring personal calamity I even tried to seek the aide of a good old fashioned shrink. I went ahead and called University Mental Health Services only to be told by the not-so-nice receptionist that their earliest appointment wasn't for another week. How's that for rapid response? If you're ever on the brink, you only have to teeter for seven days before...