Word: theseus
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Ariane (the French name for the Cretan princess of Greek mythology whose thread helped Theseus escape from the Labyrinth) took nearly a decade to develop. It is not only a triumph of European technology, but a stellar example of something much more rare: real international cooperation. The big rocket's first and third stages were built in France, the second in West Germany. Britain developed much of the computer software. Contributions came from Belgium, Spain, The Netherlands and, in fact, all of the founding partners in this billion-dollar collaboration. Ariane's first commercial flight is scheduled...
...best of the Germans is probably A.R. Penck (born Ralf Winkler), who was on show at the Sonnabend Gallery. An East German emigre to the West, he does mock-archaeological images blown up to "American" size. On a flat ground, flat pictographs: Ariadne holding her thread, Theseus as a stick figure with spear, a Minotaur. This primitivism is meant to suggest a heroic Aegean prehistory, a lost age when sibyls muttered in every cleft, and any scratch or spiral meant something. But Penck's images are mere quotation suffused with graphic charm; they are little more than the husks...
...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...