Word: robertson
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...Thomasina Coverly (Sarah Thomas '04), the precocious daughter of Lord and Lady Croom, the aristocrats who own Sidley Park. Jana Howland's costume design evokes the complexity of period dress through relatively simple outfits, which seem credible but not overwrought. In the present-day scenes, academics Hannah Jarvis (Megan Robertson '04), the quiet, shrewd, studious scholar, and Bernard Nightingale (John Arnold, a professional), the arrogant, flamboyant publicity-monger, spar with each other in even more perfectly chosen accoutrements. Jarvis wears flats and a baggy sweater, Nightingale a tailored three-piece suit and elaborate facial hair. The production's selection...
...part the actors do them justice. Sadly, British accents are rather uniformly weak; with the exception of Arnold, the best the actors achieve is a consistent and inoffensive muddle of British and American English. On balance, the present-day scenes are slightly better than those set in the past. Robertson and Arnold are excellent in their exchanges with each other; they recognize the extreme dryness of Stoppard's wit and construct their characters accordingly. Geordie Broadwater '04 is also outstanding in these scenes as Valentine Coverly, a member of the family that still lives at Sidley Park. Broadwater is weighted...
...Robertson, focusing on one character's descent into madness becomes a means of avoiding the madness trap. Not until the end of the play does Mary Girard admitor rather, accepther insanity. But she is surrounded from the very beginning by nameless characters whose abnormal mental states are already well established, making her the only persona in the drama with any degree of development. The Furies, as Robertson calls them, are dramatic constants, little more than moving pieces of scenery in the story of Mary's fall from sanity. But this dramatic bracketing of the other characters on stage...
...that playwrights as talented as Bennett and Robertson must resort to such shifts in focus in order to tell the simple and compelling story of a man or woman gone mad? Countless novels, from Notes from Underground to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, depict the inner lives of deeply troubled individuals, as do untold numbers of movies. But novels and movies share a subjectivity that drama categorically lacks. Both can get inside the heads of their characters in a way that no piece of theater...
...once you have become little more than a set piece, a constant force of irrationality. There is a reason that the conflicts of government play a larger role in the second part of Bennett's play than the first. And, more to the point, there is a reason Robertson's play ends with Mary declaring herself insane. From that point on, there can be no further story to tell...