Word: shakespeareanly
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...level; it is this that makes the play seem better than it really is. This Much Ado is a real company show. Just about everyone speaks cleanly, crisply, intelligibly, and with adequate projection; and there are precious few of those unintentionally ear-assaulting vowels that mar most large-cast Shakespearean productions...
There is some variation, of course. Tony Thomas' Messenger is too studied in speech. On the other hand, the best delivery in the whole show comes from William Glover's warm Leonato; so skillful is he that he sounds as though he had spoken nothing but Shakespearean English all his life...
Understandably, Cariou is not a match for Sri Laurence Olivier, whose Henry V is the one Shakespearean role in which he is indisputably supreme. Carious does not quite have all the voice needed for the "Once more unto the breach" harangue, as magnificent a military pep-talk as anyone has ever trumpeted forth. What is curious is that the British soldiers vigorously hurl balls at the toy cardboard-and-paper castle and have to interrupt the attack to listen to Henry's oratory. Kahn's direction here undercuts the need for any spur to action...
Divorced. Rod Steiger, 44, burly, Academy Award-winning master of a hundred faces (The Pawnbroker, In the Heat of the Night, No Way to Treat a Lady); by Claire Bloom, 37, the wistful ballerina in Charlie Chaplin's 1952 film Limelight, and veteran Shakespearean actress; on grounds of incompatibility; after nine years of marriage, one child; in Juarez, Mexico...
...early gropings in the darkened theater. But now the blackout is permanent, and the laughter an echo of hell in which there can be no conclusion without calamity and no denouement without death. As More, Nicol Williamson moves through the film with a looming rage that is Shakespearean in its intensity.* Bathed in such solar glare, the other actors are lit only by reflection. Karina looks and sounds a tart, but she has little of the compelling eroticism that the part requires. At his worst, Herve should convey a quality that is pretty deadly; Drouot's menace lies mainly...