Word: septimus
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...stately pleasure dome Sidley Park, built by a shrewd but merry widow in Derbyshire, England, in 1809. Its inhabitants include her precocious daughter, Thomasina (Gretchen Cleevely), who is busily deducing the physics of heat without the use of mathematics and to the astonishment of her dashing tutor, Septimus (Conner Trinneer), a craggy landscaper who wishes to redesign Arcadia in a more gothic style, including a hermitage and a rented hermit, and Ezra Chater (Stephen Temperley), a second-rate poet. Oh, and Lord Byron also wanders about the premises, though, sadly, off-stage...
...also a sort of trans-century canticle whose themes resound through the decades in transmuted, enriched forms. Stoppard has devised the perfect setting for his verbal ambiguity and punning, as when he plays on the phrase "the action of bodies in heat." To Thomasina and her tutor Septimus Hodge, the words suggest the entropic universe of the second law of thermodynamics and the collapse of classical mathematics. But to Chloe Coverly, a distant descendant of Thomasina, those bodies are human and the heat is sexual. Words, no less than the house's visitors, are constantly on the move...
...London, has survived the passage to Broadway intact, although the acting was generally superior in the original production. While perfectly sufficient, the present Thomasina (Jennifer Dundas) doesn't bring to this brutally taxing role of doomed prodigy quite the dancing-flame intensity that Emma Fielding did. And the new Septimus (Billy Crudup) has the aplomb but not the haunted intellectual uneasiness Rufus Sewell conveyed. A pleasing surprise, however, is Robert Sean Leonard, playing Valentine Coverly, a modern-day biologist and computer scientist. As Claudio in Kenneth Branagh's film Much Ado About Nothing, Leonard looked thoroughly out of his element...
They include Harris, Safra Professor of Jewish History and Sephardic Civilization Bernard Septimus, Hancock Professor of Hebrew and other Oriental Languages Peter B. Machinist '66, Professor of Yiddish Literature and Comparative Literature Ruth R. Wisse and Starr Professor of Classical and Modern Jewish and Hebrew Literature James I. Kugel, sources said...
...suicide. She had always been morbidly self-critical, agonized over almost every book, sometimes suffered a complete nervous collapse. Perhaps, as she stood beside the Ouse, as World War II and the war's changes closed over her, Virginia Woolf came to feel at last like war-shocked Septimus Smith, whose suicide she had described in Mrs. Dalloway: "Human nature, in short, was on him-the repulsive brute with the blood-red nostrils. . . . The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself...