Word: pyrrhus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...palace once. Now the arches have sagged, and the staircases end in midair. The steeply raked floor intersects doorways at crazy angles, as though it were not wood but water, flooding a city where the people too seem to be drowning. This haunted spot is Epirus, home of Pyrrhus, heroic son of the even more valiant Achilles, and the time is soon after the Trojan...
...neoclassicism of the set and costumes. The plot is a sour inversion of the lovers' tangle in A Midsummer Night's Dream: Orestes (Kevin McNally), son of the murdered war hero Agamemnon, pursues his cousin Hermione (Penelope Wilton), daughter of Helen of Troy, who in turn loves Achilles' son Pyrrhus (Peter Eyre). But Pyrrhus, although betrothed to Hermione, has insulted his fellow Greeks by offering his heart and throne to Andromache (Janet Suzman), widow of the Trojan prince Hector, and by sparing her son Astyanax, the last male of the royal house of Troy...
...Suzman, Andromache's immersion in the past is not weak or dreamy but sexy and compelling. In the end, the enslaved queen rules over the city, and her son has been declared the rightful future king of Troy. The fickle, feckless others have been destroyed by their excesses: Pyrrhus murdered, Hermione a suicide, Orestes driven mad. Ultimately the production's shortcomings are not important. Racine, Miller and Set Designer Richard Hudson thrust the audience into a world askew, and the force that has caused the upheaval -- the dizzying, delirious and dangerous power of passion -- has not much changed from...