Word: iv
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...dramatic core of his plays. French, from her own translation, is the language coming from her actors' mouths, but the dramatic idiom in the three productions she brought to Los Angeles is Asian: Japanese for Richard II, Indian for Twelfth Night and a mixture of both for Henry IV, Part I. The actors either paint their faces white or hide them with masks; they wear Oriental dress and usually run rather than walk across the vast, bare performance area. No ordinary stage was large enough for Mnouchkine's requirements, so the festival put her company...
...troupe's performances are a spectacle for the eye and a challenge to the mind. But brilliant as they frequently are, they are more Mnouchkine than Shakespeare, and in their excessive length-Henry IV is more than five hours-seem to be testing the audience's endurance as much as its intelligence. Nevertheless, what Mnouchkine and her company have conceived is odd, provoking, and just what Festival Director Robert Fitzpatrick hoped for when he chose the festival's dramatic presentations. "Usually people come out of the theater in Los Angeles, get in their cars and go home...
...Ivan IV, Tsar of Russia from 1533 to 1584, was not, strictly speaking, terrible. That cognomen came from a mistranslation of the Russian word grozny, which means something closer to "awe inspiring." Yet in just about every other sense, Ivan was ghastly enough...
Though Ivan IV liked to deliver his mayhem personally, much of it was meted out by the oprichniki, his 6,000-member guard of thugs who terrorized the country for seven years until the Tsar abolished the group. In a fit of contrition late in his life, Ivan made a list of more than 3,000 opponents he had executed. He sent the names, along with generous sums, to monasteries for memorial prayers to be recited...
...kept up with his words. His obsession to win almost killed him: in the summer of 1978 he received last rites from a priest when his body temperature hit 108° during the 7.1-mile Falmouth Road Race in Massachusetts; after winning the 1982 Boston Marathon, he required an IV tube as this time his body temperature plummeted to a dangerous 88°. He trained relentlessly, never taking a break from season to season...