Word: wilde
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...virtues, this particular taming is sometimes more shrewd than Shrew. The writers have edited Shakespeare's speeches, transposed lines, and improvised bits of business for the Burtons that never took place in the Globe's wooden O. Despite such wild tampering, most of the words and-more important -all of the spirit of the play have been maintained. To make sure that the viewer's eye never rests long enough to get restive, Zeffirelli builds the production against a background of burnt sienna, vermilion and viridian-the splashiest colors of the Renaissance palette. He also keeps Taylor...
Apparently he couldn't play the flute. In Ibsen's The Wild Duck, Hjalmar Ekdal renders "with sentimental expression" a brief passage from a Bohemian folk-dance. In the Adams House version he is about to let loose when the door conveniently swings open, and we never hear a note...
Such problems abound in James Burt's production of The Wild Duck. But even if there are faults more glaring than the lack of flute music, they can't cripple a show so liberally marked with hard work and competence. Ibsen is not often staged at Harvard; drama students read him and study him, but rarely see him or perform him. Now Adams House has tackled one of his most difficult plays and come out, if precariously...
...Ibsen, The Wild Duck was something of a dramatic non-sequitur. In it he consciously defied the vital premise of much of his earlier (and later) work; that truth must inevitably conquer falsehood. Ekdal, the central character, has lost both fortune and prestige in a grisly episode involving his father's illegal use of government lumber. The father, a broken man, is surviving on the charity of his guilty old friend Werle, who was also involved in the scandal but was acquitted for lack of evidence. In the last 15 years, both Ekdal and his father have built...
...these deceptions are summed up in the title character, or, if you prefer, title bird. It is a wild duck, but it lives inside. And the question posed by Ibsen's play is whether such an incongruity should not be permitted to last even when it fosters happiness, whether innocence cannot sometimes be desirable...