Word: iii
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Filmed in 1994 as The Madness of King George, Alan Bennett's historical-fictional tale of English monarch George III's bouts of madness was a stage drama before it became a film, and theater is a fitting medium for a play that muses on the theatricality of the monarchy. Chronicling the personal and political fallout of George's episodes of what was probably porphyria, a metabolism disorder affecting factors from urine color to sensitivity to light, Bennett's script is renowned for its wit and inventiveness-and for its difficulty. Director Frederick Hood '01 has the energies...
Alan Bennett's The Madness of George III opens shortly after England has lost its American colonies and shows the Establishment gone amuck. The King is mad, the Prince of Wales is scheming to displace his father, the Queen and the Prime Minister are determined to keep him in power and a host of incompetent doctors and parliamentarians wander in and out of the center stage. Politics as usual...
...king's madness is resolved, the play leaves open a host of insidious questions about leadership and its dissimulation. The crux of the play lies in the king's remark as he recovers his sanity: "I have remembered how to seem; that is the important thing." Sanity, for George III, involves maintaining a public persona. The king's dilemma, and the question that Bennett throws out at his audience, is where does a suitable public face begin and sanity...
...Madness of King George III will be the first student production on the Mainstage this fall. Hood's choice to put up The Madness of King George III was "informed chiefly by the space [he] wanted to use." In Hood's opinion, the Mainstage warranted "a show that is epic in scope, with a large cast and incorporating the elements of 'total theater'." Hood looked for a story that is played in a variety of locales and whose characters are allowed full development...
Bennett's The Madness of George III and Peter Shaffer's Amadeus both fit these critera. Shaffer's play was at the origin of Milos Foreman's Academy Award-winning film Amadeus, and has recently been staged on Broadway. Although The Madness of King George III came out as a movie in 1993, it has not been recently staged on Broadway. As such, Hood decided to direct The Madness of King George III...