Word: shakespearian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Finally, however, Redford the musical comedy director goes home and Redford the Shakespearian director returns. The last scene is as difficult to present as the eye-gouging scene in King Lear. Redford stages it identically to the courtroom scene, with Hermione on a pedestal above the rest of the players. It is a beautiful idea, uniting the play--allowing the virtue of Hermione to conquer all this time around. Clemenson once again masters the complexity of his role, as he wondrously discovers that the statue is in fact his living wife...
...opening scene, famous for its courtly formality, its symmetry, and its fairy-tale irrationality, looks completely straightforward until you notice the Fool wandering around in a squat, waving a wooden gyroscope over his head like some mystical wand. The standard swipes, grunts, and lunges of the Shakespearian sword-fight punctuate the duel between Edgar and Edmund, but the preceding battle between France's forces and the English army becomes a strange slow-motion dumbshow on Cain's stage...
...intelligible. At the Loeb, the traditional values of a good Shakespeare production are flung aside from the start, but replaced with nothing better than caprice and superficiality. The talents of the actors never have a chance to show themselves, because the director obviously wants to make a point about Shakespearian productions, not to present a play about human beings and their failings, the "nothings" that mean so much in their lives...
Hughes has a big smile and good looks, but ten lines into his first speech he drops the thread of Shakespearian poetry and never picks it up again. His voice maintains the same pace and tone throughout the show, except at moments of special excitement when he raises it up high in his throat in a doomed attempt to communicate wonderment. When he is banished for killing Juliet's cousin in a duel and flees to his confessor's cell, he collapses on the floor and cries; the irritating sobs continue interminably. They seem an admission of the actor...
Dosadi is the name of a barren planet, isolated from the rest of the universe by a "god-wall" from an unknown source, the Calebens. (No Shakespearian connotations, as they are good guys.) Outside of Dosadi's wall is a complex universe with a tenuous power balance among humans, the frog-like Gowachins and the death-dancing wreaves--with their Kung-fu-like movements and poisoned mandibles. Jorj X. McKie, a red-haired man of Polynesian descent, is the only human accepted as a Legum in the Gowachin legal system. Herbert fails to give the legal cult the depth...