Word: vivat
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...playing in more than a dozen U.S. cities. Jackson is also starred in TV's Elizabeth R, a six-part series that has broken all ratings records for noncommercial television and is up for seven Emmy awards next week. On the New York stage, Robert Bolt's Vivat! Vivat Regina!, with Claire Bloom as Mary and Eileen Atkins as Elizabeth, has just finished a Broadway run and is scheduled to go on tour in the fall. Also in New York, a musical called Elizabeth I had a short run, and at Lincoln Center there was an adaptation...
Part of what makes it all so intriguing is that comparing the various stories has become a kind of historical scrabble. Was Mary's husband, Darnley, for instance, a womanizing lech as Vivat has it? Or was he a homosexual as the movie has it? (He seems to have been the former.) The popular version of the story, accepted by those raving romantics Schiller and Donizetti, portrays Mary as a high-brogue Joan of Arc and Elizabeth as the Wicked Witch of the West. The new versions, sometimes wildly inaccurate in other ways, do at least correct that longstanding...
...resist bringing them together in a dramatic confrontation. On this point, the new scriptwriters split. Hollywood does Schiller's and Donizetti's single meeting one better and stages two, both full of ear-splitting cliches and sounding uncannily like a commercial for Tide or Cheer. In Vivat, Bolt finds his own not particularly happy solution by placing Elizabeth and Mary onstage at the same time, but in separate scenes. TV's Elizabeth R, by far the most accurate and the best of the accounts, is wise enough not even to attempt a face-to-face encounter...
...convey all this is a formidable, albeit irresistible, challenge for an actress. Two of the current attempts are strikingly successful. Eileen Atkins turns Vivat, Bolt's ponderous high school history pageant, into exciting drama, with an Elizabeth of coruscating wit and feline sensuality. Glenda Jackson, in Elizabeth R, is more subtle, but equally brilliant, with an astonishing ability to convey mood and nuance and to switch from a purr to a roar. "We are," Elizabeth proudly and accurately proclaimed, "of the nature of the lion...
...colorful pageantry, it provides "posh escapism," as Glenda Jackson calls it. "People," she says, "like going back to black-and-white days when people lived their lives by absolute standards." Producers in turn like what audiences like, and they have been quick to jump on the Tudor bandwagon. Vivat, after all, was a hit in London two seasons...