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The Roman Tragedies
I would say that last night I sat through six hours of Shakespeare’s three historically-based Roman tragedies – in Dutch, but in fact I did what I was invited to do and milled about. I lounged center-stage on a couch for the first scenes of Coriolanus, at one point dodging a flurry of papers tossed…
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Wake in Fright
In his great essay On Racine, the French theorist Roland Barthes observed that the most ancient of tragedies arose in the arid and sundrenched landscapes of the Mediterranean, under merciless skies and aside great oceans. It would have been no accident that a sense of cosmic isolation and the exigencies of survival posed a dramatic…
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Wuthering Heights
One of the clearer processes of action and reaction in cultural history was that Romanticism reacted against Neo-Classicism, that Naturalism reacted in turn against Romanticism, and that, in a somewhat minor aftershock, Aestheticism recoiled from Naturalism. Amongst the many remarkable things about the new film of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is that it brings the…
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Heartless
In the mid-’80s I ventured to say in a published review of Sam Shepard’s True West that we were in a presence of a new dramatic genre, which I dubbed “the situation tragedy.” This notion was consistent, in retrospect, with a recognition on the part of Raymond Williams and others that circumstance had replaced action…
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Trishna
Michael Winterbottom’s TRISHNA is sumptuous. It adapts Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles to a contemporary Indian setting and in the process retains the essential beauty of the tragedy while stripping from it the nostalgia and romanticism to which period filmmaking is prone. The past is everywhere in the images – the colonial edifices, the…
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These Seven Sicknesses
Green tea is served during the dinner and dessert breaks of the Flea Theater’s production of Sean Graney’s THESE SEVEN SICKNESSES, which telescopes the seven extant tragedies of Sophocles into a single play. The cast mingles with the audience during the intervals – the gentleman at the serving cart plays the warrior Ajax a few…
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Coriolanus
My suspicion is that a lot of people would find this film version of Shakespeare’s CORIOLANUS to be tough going, and for a good ways into it, I was one of them. The early images struck me as heavy-handedly pacifist, modernized and uncoupled from Shakespeare, who is wise on the subject of war but hardly…
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Anonymous
What if anything to say about ANONYMOUS? I can say that I enjoyed it well enough without thinking it great. That although a legitimate argument can be made for Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, as the author of the plays that are called Shakespeare’s, the film does not make anything like one…
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Festival de otoño en primavera
I saw three shows at Madrid’s eccentrically named FESTIVAL DE OTOÑO EN PRIMAVERA (Fall Festival in Springtime), which brought a plethora of international theater to the Spanish capital in May and June. My listening comprehension of Spanish is what it is, so I would not pretend to have followed every thread of the multiple plots…
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Creditors • Uncle Vanya
It comes as no surprise that Alan Rickman, a mordantly arresting screen actor, would have an affinity for Strindberg, and he has directed CREDITORS with terrifying deftness. Less performed than Miss Julie, The Stronger or Dance of Death, less studied than The Father, CREDITORS, like some overlooked stepchild, has always begged the recognition that it…