Word: turpin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...frighteningly easy charm. The audience is enchanted and seduced right up until the moment when Sweeney slits the first of many throats, and even then he retains a large share of his psychotic appeal. And Sweeney, after all, has his reasons. He’s after the lecherous Judge Turpin (Jonathan M. Roberts ’09), who, Sweeney learns, raped his wife Lucy and then adopted his young daughter Johanna (Christine K. L. Bendorf ’10). This, of course, is only the beginning of the show’s crazed perverseness. When Sweeney returns to London after...
...Burton takes a purchase on our more elevated emotions by showing the source of Sweeney's rage. Fifteen years earlier he was a sweet young man, named Benjamin Barker. His beloved wife and young daughter were ripped from him by the evil Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who exiled him to Australia. So Sweeney is a romantic tragic figure; he has fallen from a great height -off the cloud of his belief that love can last forever. Now he knows better, and throws himself into this amorality play. It's man devouring man, vengeance destroying ideals...
More than 20 million Britons, 1 in every 3 alive (among them King George VI), tuned in to their radios in 1951 when Randolph Turpin took on Sugar Ray Robinson for the middleweight crown of the world. This was doubly surprising, insofar as the mixed-race Englishman was boxing for a country where, just four years earlier, blacks - even if British-born - were not allowed to compete for the national championship. When Turpin pulled off a remarkable upset against the highly favored American - only Robinson's second loss in 135 fights - he seemed more than ever an emblem...
...would be nice to think that his case was exceptional. But it is the burden of Caryl Phillips' latest searching meditation on outsiders in England that Turpin's story is much too typical. Beside him, in the triptych that makes up Foreigners: Three English Lives, is the story of Samuel Johnson's Jamaican servant, Francis Barber, who ended up in penury, though Phillips' narrator remembers him as "at one time, probably the foremost negro in England." Then there's the story of David Oluwale, a Nigerian who stowed away as a teenager to come to England in 1949, dreaming...
...late master's clothes and looking "as sad and as broken as any man can be." Oluwale, discovered dead in a river, after police harassment, is described by one cop as a "wild animal, not a human being" and by a nurse as "a savage animal." Both Barber and Turpin marry white Englishwomen, yet systematically undermine themselves through failures of judgment...