Word: twelfth
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...faulty arithmetic aside. A 20th season is reason enough to celebrate. The AST has aptly just kicked off with Twelfth Night, a work often chosen for special occasions. Tyrone Guthrie used it to inaugurate Canada's Stratford Festival, and it was the first Shakespearean play ever to be televised in its entirety from a theatre. It is probable that Shakespeare wrote the play for an important Twelfth Night entertainment at Queen Elizabeth's court. The year of its first performance is in some dispute, but such a superlative achievement had to have come after the two other romantic comedies...
...Twelfth Night is not a pioneering work. The playwright was dealing with materials that he and others had manipulated countless times. The result was, to borrow Pope's words, "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd." The Bard here had three main plots going at once; and in no other play did he tie up so many complicated strands at the end with such mastery or with such a blend of feelings...
...serviceable unit set. In the distance is a sky-and-seascape (I could do without the movable ocean-wave cutouts). To the right is a staircase, and situated here and there are a stone lantern, short columns and statuettes. Perhaps suggested by the Christmas-tree tinsel of the Twelfth Night season, the pervading color of all the solid objects and their trimmings is silver. A close inspection, however, reveals a number of human skulls outlined in the surface textures, as though to suggest--quite rightly--that there are sombre or tart undertones in this play, which many people take...
...Twelfth Night...
...merely average revival of a classic, whether by Shakespeare or some other great playwright, leaves only the forlorn impression of a weighted balloon. It takes superior acting, direction and a current of passion and imagination to raise it gloriously aloft. Stratford opened its 20th season with two grounded balloons, Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet...