Word: pasteboard
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...flesh draw the playwright's satire. But unlike with Shakespeare's plays, a modern-day director is hard-pressed to give the vengeance play's intentionally superficial characters any meaning for a modern-day audience. The result, under the direction of Andrew Atkinson, is an exaggerated performance by pasteboard characters...
...Lawrence's penultimate works, is so intent on depicting the stiffness of the period that he seems to be merely a life-size extension of his starched collar. Penelope Keith, as the Honorable Dorothy Brett, a frigid woman with a crush on Lawrence, can best be regarded as a pasteboard pastiche; this is the extent of her role and talent...
...production focuses on the very characters modern readers of Nicholas Nickleby find to be pasteboard cliches of middle-class sentimentality: noble Nicholas, snow-white Kate, wounded faun Smike?and makes their stodgy virtues real and comprehensible. It renounces the fey modernism of camp; it takes a stand, grows tall in its righteousness, infuses the audience with its passion, brings Dickens back to life not as a carver of curios but as a man who, in George Orwell's phrase, "is generously angry...
...former resident of Canaday Hall--the newest Yard dorm--conversing with two administrators asked whether his freshman home had "come apart at the seams." One administrator answered that yes, indeed, it had--shortly after its construction. The inside pasteboard walls, the administrator explained, had begun to cave in shortly after Canaday opened...
Blame literary fashion or the Zeitgeist, but novels seem to be growing ever less capacious. Those that find room for historical sweep or the intricacies of public affairs can usually squeeze in only pasteboard heroes and heroines. The ones that concentrate on fine-tuned psyches or dark nights of the soul generally admit the outside world as nothing more than a nuisance or irrelevant noise. Fewer and fewer new novels attempt to bridge this gap, to extend complex characters beyond the tight little domain of solipsism...