Word: napoleons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Here, at least, as the lights fade and the mysterious lady and "le Petit Caporal" watch the dispatches burning in the dark, their faces glowing in the flickering flames, one wonders who has finally won, if Napoleon has conquered yet another woman, or if he has met his Fireloo...
...loon-tenant. He has this sense of uncanny timing, this air of naivete that works particularly well when he tells the strange lady to take off her dress so he can see if she really isn't that boy in disguise or when he casually draws a scenario for Napoleon showing how his horse had actually won the battle of Lodi...
...nuance from their actors--facial expressions and the slightest gestures must be just right--and both are admirable. Mosca has a certain half-smile that he can turn into a scowl as easily as a self-congratulatory smirk. Although his rages somehow seem more passionate than Napoleon probably was, the whole play seems to support that kind of style. After all, Shaw needed to build a rapport between Napoleon and the audience so he could get in his good lines about the English...
...THIS starts when Napoleon finds out that his temptress is part English and part Irish. The combination, he says, after having been thoroughly fooled, may be the only formula to defeat him on the battlefield--a foreboding of his defeat by the Irish-born General Wellington leading the English army at Waterloo...
Bonnie Brewster is a match for Mosca's bravado. The way the strange lady shifts the burden of guilt to Napoleon demands a sort of subtle feminine guile that just doesn't come through in Shaw's words, something impossible to describe really. That's one of the attractions of the play--it's almost as if Shaw were testing the acting abilities of his two favorite performers; whoever acted better would convince the audience that he or she had won in this battle of the minds...