Word: witnesses
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Kate Simon's travel books and her autobiographical portraits, Bronx Primitive and A Wider World, are admired for their good sense, wit and pithy grace. These qualities serve her well as a popular historian of a period that has set the Western world's standards for art, culture, cynical statecraft and consumer spending. The legacy of the Italian Renaissance is never far from contemporary tastes; its style and egocentricities survive wherever easy money, ambition and ideas flourish. Lofty mindedness and low animal cunning rarely had a better stage on which to interact. As Simon puts it, "The susurrus of silks...
...drawbacks in the Winthrop production of The Real Thing lie primarily with the script, a script which ironically won a Tony Award in 1982 when it hit New York. Though the play is contemporary and fast-paced, Stoppard relies too much on his wit and hardly carries his play beyond a well-ornamented series of love triangles. It may be thought-provoking, but with characters who scare each other with the first sound they make, it cannot be moving...
...first scene establishes the play's mood of underlying despair and over-hanging wit. Max accuses his wife Charlotte of infidelity, disputing her claim that she has just returned from a Geneva art auction. Due to Stoppard's cunning, his ambiguous lines refer to either her new lover or her trip. "How's old Geneva then? Frank doing well?" "What?" Charlotte asks. "The Swiss Franc. Is it doing well?" They refuse to address the crisis at hand. Instead, Max digresses on apparently far-out topics which actually parallel the scene's conflict, a technique Stoppard uses and overuses later...
Remember that old book, the Wit and Wisdom of Walter Mondale? It was 200 pages--all blank...
...pious daughters of a visionary preacher. While he lives, they sacrifice their lives to his faintly absurd beliefs. After he dies, they devote themselves to his memory by keeping his dwindling, aging, increasingly fractious flock together. Their story, stretching over many years, is told with deft economy and quiet wit by Writer-Director Gabriel Axel, who builds an uncannily rich texture out of the simplest materials. Still, the viewer muses, this picture is called Babette's Feast. Where is Babette? Where is her feast...