Word: shakespeareanly
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...through mid-June at the Museum of Broadcasting in Manhattan-is less a professional challenge than an act of reckless physical courage. This recklessness has become something of a habit with Olivier. A sense of danger, athletic as well as emotive, has often been at the heart of his Shakespearean performances. His Romeo (1935) clambered up to his fair lady's balcony in record time; his Hamlet (1947) leaped from a 14-ft. balcony to wrestle with Laertes; his Coriolanus (1959) executed a horrendous, death-daring fall. Inside this theatrical peer, the spirit of a Douglas Fairbanks was always...
...spring the weather has been weird: violent, Shakespearean. It might have been worse, of course. In the annus mirabilis of 1811, the air was dense with portents: a comet in the northern sky, an eclipse of the sun. The Eastern U.S. was broiled by ungodly heat and swept by tornadoes and hurricanes. Multitudes of squirrels, in the tens of thousands, were seen migrating south across Kentucky. In 1816 Connecticut had a blizzard on June 6. On the Fourth of July that year, the highest temperature recorded in Savannah, Ga., was 46°F The prevailing opinion, for a little while...
...ironic, because the play is now worn like an old coin from passing through the hands of so many directors. Although it's been 16 years since its original minting, this weekend's Dunster House performance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hasn't lost its edge. The innovation of two Shakespearean anti-heroes on center stage, the stark contrast between Elizabethan and modern language--and the themes of the finality of death, the role of fate and the insignificance of human life--are not dulled even after many staging. Director Roger Kaplan's interpretation, while not radically different from others,' lands...
...Elizabethan dialogue to a spare, absurdist setting--as critics have pointed out, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern draws heavily from Samuel Beckett's style. But director Kaplan perhaps tips the scales too heavily toward the absurd tradition. The stark stage, the sparse furniture are all there, and rightly so. But the Shakespearean tradition is just as important: Stoppard includes sizable chunks from Hamlet, and his own words show a penchant for language tricks...
...slowing down the fast-paced delivery. Kaplan might have reinforced the contrast inherent in Stoppard's play and done more justice to the Hamlet half. For the near-antithesis between the two voices, the Shakespearean prose and the Beckett-like, riddling repetitions, lead to the play's core: Hamlet's tragedy as seen from side-stage, through the Godot-like absurdity of two characters who are not the least bit heroic...