Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...main scenes are played centerstage, the other actors watch from the sides and the scaffolding. They may be recognizable characters from the play, overhearing but unable to act upon information vital to their interests. Or they may simply be serving as the eyes, ears and unsleeping conscience of both Victorian London and the modern audience...
...respond to ideas from the two directors, from Designer John Napier, from Composer Stephen Oliver and all those actors." Working communally?an R.S.C. tradition exemplified by Peter Brook's 1970 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream?each performer was asked to research an aspect of life in Victorian England and given a chapter of the novel to paraphrase. "We had a crazy theory," Nunn says, "that if 39 of the cast died, the one survivor could come in and tell the story by himself...
...MARCHES ON--and, in Harold Pinter's world, sometimes retreats. Pinter, after the fashion of most absurdist playwrights, delights in distorting and playing with time. And John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman is a novel of time--a modern narrator looking through a modern window at a Victorian story...
...transforms the book-within-a-book into a film-within-a-film with a minimum of messiness. His screenplay respects the intent of the original novel, whose 20th-century structure of author's conceits and devices framed a haunting story of 19th-century romance and passion. By telling the Victorian story, then weaving a parallel story around the romance of the actors making the film. Pinter achieves something of the same sense. The 20th century doesn't just give perspective to the Victorian, but is commented on itself--an important, if implicit, dimension of Fowles's novel...
...very different settings. Filmed in the seaside town of Lyme Regis, Dorset, the 19th-century backgrounds are impossibly green fields, lush forests, and dark, crashing waves. The music supports the imagery, strings welling up in the background to suit this vivid and strikingly visual interpretation of every Victorian novel ever written. The blacks are black and the whites white in this world of sin and expiation where the characters care deeply about the conventions they transgress. Today's world, in contrast, appears in crisp, colorless light, everything modern and vaguely jet-setty. Porsches cruise the cobbled streets and the casual...