Word: modernish
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...show, produced by Britain's Royal National Theater and staged by its artistic director, Richard Eyre, is modernish -- 1930s -- in its dress and visual vocabulary. It is meant to evoke 20th century memories ranging from Oswald Mosley's English fascists to the Ceausescu and Marcos regimes. Yet it is entirely faithful to the politics and psychology of Shakespeare's text. No production in memory has better evoked the terrifying instability of this buccaneer world. Rather than the embodiment of motiveless malignity, Richard is simply a skillful and ruthless practitioner of the techniques of his backstabbing times. While invested by McKellen...
...modern dress. They gave a mild fillip to a classic story, but they did not make for an effective play. This Antigone, barring its one big clash between despot and defier, was flat, fumbly theater. This Antigone, shorn of her Resistance aura, was unmoving and unreal. And in a modernish setting, the burial issue on which the plot hinges seemed outlandishly bizarre...
...modernish costumes helped, too: Hamlet wears trousers instead of tights, delivers "To be, or not to be," in a dinner jacket with silver-brocade lapels. No help at all were the unpoetic sergeants who inevitably shattered the high-tragic mood of the soldier cast's rehearsals, with such prose passages as "Hey, Polonius, you and those other guys get some brooms and clean up the theayter...
| 1 |