Word: victorian
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Despite its paper-thin plot, implausible coincidences, and unbelievable ending, The Importance of Being Earnest remains one of the most original and razor sharp plays ever written. Located firmly in the Victorian era, the story revolves around the caddish Algernon Moncrieff (Kent French) and his friend John Worthing (G. Zachariah White). As both men independently undertake a harmless deception, their "bunburying" turns into a major misunderstanding and leads to a first-rate satire of the English class structure. However, as valiantly as the performers try to do Wilde's words justice, the overall acting can often best be described...
Ruddigore was originally intended as a satire of the gauche melodramas popular in Victorian England, according to Brian C. Gatten '01, the Gilbert and Sullivan Players historian. Ruddigore certainly manages to fulfill its role as a mockery, as it pokes fun at the Victorian cult of good manners through the character of the overly-virtuous village beauty, Rose Maybud, whose comical reliance on a book of ladies etiquette is played to the hilt throughout the show. Callan Barrett is perfectly cast as Rose, exaggerating all of her ultra-feminine gestures, right from the outset of her tiptoeing, eye lash-batting...
There was a time when Sontag the critic scorned scenery-crammed, realistic Victorian novels and their confident claims of authorial omniscience. Now she has written one and demonstrated, in the process, that narrative skill can come in unfashionable packages...
...most accessible works (The Real Thing, the movie Shakespeare in Love) fairly reek with erudition. Invention, having its U.S. East Coast premiere at Philadelphia's Wilma Theater, is no exception. Eloquent and witty, it's also intellectually challenging. On one level, the play is about A. E. Housman, the Victorian poet (A Shropshire Lad) and scholar, at age 77 dreaming he has returned to the Oxford of his youth. It's also about the love of language and the language of love (i.e., the earliest Latin love poetry). There are some snooze-inducing stretches dealing with English academe, but overall...
...before I explain that, let me give you a little background. I'm probably behind the times on this issue, but I believe that the theater can be a moral force in human life. Perhaps sympathetic is a better word. The late Victorian technique of bringing the house lights down at the start of a production did something that had never been achieved in human history before: it gave human beings the opportunity to observe others with the absolute certainty that they themselves would not be observed in turn--if not by the actors themselves, then at least...