Word: nineteenth
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Phillips says these characters ended up this way for reasons having to do with his own life and his concern for historical accuracy. He found himself growing more sympathetic with Emily because "two elements about her mirrored my own life. Women in the early nineteenth century in English society were incredibly marginalized; they were looked upon as little more than kids, basically, who you had to patronize and tolerate. To some extent as a kid growing up in England that's how I felt. The other thing was, [Emily] made a journey to the Caribbean. When I left college, that...
...slave Cambridge, Phillips realized, simply could not accommodate contemporary conceptions of Black assimilation and resistance. "If you were a slave in the nineteenth century and you had the power of self-expression and self-insight that would be necessary to write the way Cambridge does, there was a good chance you'd acquired those skills from the Bible. [So] there was a damned good chance you were a dyed-in-the-wool Christian, and [that] you had a very strange and haughty and self-regarding view of yourself vis a vis the other slaves. You would think you were better...
...ornate language which uncannily mimics nineteenth century prose also contributes to this distancing effect. Nailing down the antiquated style presented some difficulties; an Edinburgh scholar of the time period's nonfiction checked Phillips' manuscripts for anachronistic syntax. The language produces an almost surreally understated voice that allows Phillips to write about the horrors of slavery in a eerie, muted fashion. As he says, "you've got all these massive dramas going on--people living in the most unbelievable poverty, people being killed--and [Emily's] writing about it as if it's very polite after dinner conversation...
...relocation of the action adds nothing to the play. Renaissance Italy and the nineteenth-century South share frivolous aristocrats and a conservative marriage ethic, but this is not enough to justify the change of scene. Perhaps there is an obscure reference to the Southern psyche--but to the uninitiated the production seems to revolve around the one minor actor, Joshua Bloom, who speaks with a Southern accent. A riverboat does not lend itself to the action: the gulling scenes are harder to stage, and the space confuses the audience. What is outside and what is inside? Shilling's adaptation causes...
Enter Winona Ryder's character, Mina, an English schoolteacher and the nineteenth-century reincarnation of the Transylvanian princess. Dracula's glimpse of her photograph sets the stage for the love story which drives the film. Although a monster, Dracula is a rather compelling romantic hero--top hat, John Lennon glasses and all. Oldman successfully evokes the quirky, bordering on psychotic, vulnerability he brought to other peculiar roles in "Sid and Nancy" and "Track...