Word: melmoth
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Dwarfing the actors as only the Loeb can do, making action seem remote and impersonal, Sebastian Melmoth's impressive but ugly set puts the Loeb one step closer to a kind of synthetheatre defeating the electricity theatre can generate between stage and audience. The set's colors are not so much terra cottas as flesh and, added to the admirable but arty lighting, the whole thing was weighted toward the ghastly...
Ginn has perhaps made a mistake in directing such a cold play in emotional high-style, emphasizing spectacle with aluminized mylar sheets mirroring the audience, incense burning-away, and bits and pieces of Artaud and Grand Guignol. The set, grotesque caryatids awesomely conceived and executed by Sebastian Melmoth, nonetheless serves little intrinsic function in Ginn's concept, appearing only as so much lavish decoration surrounding the playing area. The costumes and lighting, however, work better, and are superb as only the Loeb can make them...
...boudoir, some bedside scenes. Heloise and Abelard, separated for life, long for each other and finally share a grave; Byron, fair, fattish and 40, dies of fever at Missolonghi; Goethe walks through the night to one of his many assignations; Oscar Wilde, under his enforced pseudonym of Sebastian Melmoth, dies a pariah at the Hotel d'Alsace in Paris; George Sand and Alfred de Musset kiss and wrangle; Tolstoy, in his last illness, flees his troublesome wife and dies on a hard bench in the railway station at Astapovo...
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