Word: porphyria
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...English monarch George III's bouts of madness was a stage drama before it became a film, and theater is a fitting medium for a play that muses on the theatricality of the monarchy. Chronicling the personal and political fallout of George's episodes of what was probably porphyria, a metabolism disorder affecting factors from urine color to sensitivity to light, Bennett's script is renowned for its wit and inventiveness-and for its difficulty. Director Frederick Hood '01 has the energies of a large cast to focus, and how well he does so will likely determine not whether George...
Paula (Harper Collins; 330 pages; $24) the memoir Allende began on yellow pads as she sat in the hospital, is written as an anguished letter to her daughter, who suffered from porphyria--a metabolic disorder that is rarely fatal. "They told me she would wake up in a week or two," the writer says. But months passed at Paula's bedside before Allende learned that a hospital mishap had caused irreversible brain damage. "It was destiny--and it was bad luck. After they told me, I went on writing because I could not stop. I could not let anger destroy...
King George really did go mad two hundred years ago, or so it seemed at the time. Modern research has since decided that George was suffering from porphyria, a reversible condition of the blood causing all the symptoms of insanity...
...Lord's annointed, we find, performs like any of God's lesser creations. The color of his urine is the subject of much interest in the film - during his madness, it is as blue as his blood (a symptom of porphyria). George doesn't neglect any of the other bodily functions either. "Saving your presence, I will try a fart," he informs his Lady (Helen Mirren). He is equally uninhibited...
...director Nicholas Hytner recalls, "The royal family saw it as a sad and moving story of a close relation." Princess Margaret went up to Hytner at intermission, "drink firmly in hand," and asked what ailed the twitching, foaming monarch. The King, Hytner explained, suffered from the metabolic disorder porphyria. "And what causes it?" the Queen's sister asked. As her advisers and courtiers semaphored behind her to wave off the truth, antiroyalist Hytner smiled sweetly and said, "It's hereditary...