Word: hectors
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...Cover: Acrylic paint on Masonite, by Argentine-born Hector Garrido...
...people have been rude about Hector Berlioz," says English Conductor Colin Davis, and he wishes they would quit. Alas, poor Berlioz has suffered more than his share. In 1829, when he was 25, he submitted his passionately theatrical piece for soprano and orchestra, Cléopâtre, to the Prix de Rome committee. It was rejected with a scolding from one of the judges, who said, "You refuse to write like everybody else. Even your rhythms are new. You would invent new modulations if such a thing were possible." The story goes that when Gioachino Rossini was shown Berlioz...
...another across the stage three times, Shakespeare resorting to familiar mechanics prior to an important killing as he does in Macbeth and several of the history plays. But the killing never comes, they fight their way offstage, we never see them again, our expectations are brutally cheated. Instead, Hector (decidedly the wrong man at this point) gets killed with his pants down by Achilles, and the play ends with nothing resolved and the play ends with nothing resolved and the taste in your mouth resembling, in Harvard playwright Barry Forman's terms, the bottom of a birdcage...
...smaller parts, Ronald Hunter as Hector and Louis Plante as Ajax were excellent, attempting successfully to take characters whom audiences associate with moral and physical arche-types and make them something quite different. Arthur Friedman didn't look a day older than he did playing Aufidius in a recent Loeb Coriolanus and consequently didn't convince me he was senile old Nestor for a minute...
When it was all over, this reviewer was left with the memory of reading the great play and imagining a magnificant trumpet fanfare heralding the fight between Hector and Ajax, a sound interpreted in this production by a sickly goathorn whining offstage. Every time it sounded one expected a character from a P.G. Wodehouse musical to emerge saying "Your car is ready, Lord Wooster," or something. But that brings up a whole category of fun things you can do with Shakespeare, and we'd better let well enough alone...