Word: theseus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...lived since 1948, Renault looks back to antiquity where history, legend and myth rocked in the same cradle. The King Must Die, her most widely known book, is also her best, because it leaves the reader with the illusion of having attended the birth of Western consciousness. Theseus was the narrator, and civilization was only a gleam on his sword...
...writer of Renault's re-creative powers had little difficulty moving from Theseus, mythical founder of a unified Attica, to Alexander the Great, who spread the seed of Hellenism across Asia Minor, North Africa and the brow of India. In Fire from Heaven and The Persian Boy, Renault took the most romantic of all military heroes from his beginnings as son of Philip of Macedon through his glories as youthful conqueror...
...violent hotbloods; his fairies are insect-like nature sprites, inhuman and unsettling; his "rude mechanicals" quarrel with earnestness and acrobatic precision in their stage business. The curtain rises at the Wilbur to reveal a Renaissance tapestry of equestrian combat, fair enough warning of the production's themes, and when Theseus (Harry Murphy) and Hippolyta (Karen MacDonald) have it out in a mock combat during the overture, the audience gets the message...
...have to squint hard to find inconsistencies like these, though, and aurally if not physically the music works. More curious and ironic is the presence onstage of Robert Brustein, ART's director and a philosopher of the theater in his own right, as Theseus, that unrepentant skeptic with no faith in drama or poetry. This, after all, is the character who delivers the famous speech lumping lovers, poets and madmen together as creatures of imagination, flighty and deluded...
...requires a powerful imagination indeed to suppress an involuntary wry smile when you hear Brustein's Theseus remark, of actors, "The best in this kind are but shadows." Perhaps--just as Shakespeare's play is "only" a dream. At the Loeb, both shadows and dreams seem, if only while the curtain is up, to take on a radiant and tangible form all their...