Word: illyria
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...Grecian urns and arches, encircling men and women in evening dress with cinematic light. The leaves cast soft shadows over a tuxedoed pianist as he plays dinner music. A pair of "identical" twins wanders confusedly in the garden among those they love and those who love them. This is Illyria, setting of Twelfth Night and one of the prettiest never-never lands Shakespeare ever created, translated with intelligence and sensitivity to a strangely Hollywood-esque Loeb mainstage...
...playwright set his story in Illyria, which was on the Adriatic coast and, in his day, under Venetian rule. The point of this, really, was to choose a spot distant from the England of 1600. For an exotic place Freedman has substituted an exotic time; he has located the production in the 18th century, which is of course remote from both the Elizabethan age and ours...
...often the paradisiacal glamour of Illyria, the lovely songs, the immortal lines, the great bard himself, dissolve and leave but the plot behind. Now girl-in-boy's-clothing palls, now which-twin-is-which proves yawningly wearisome. Many of the jokes are far past saving and a good bit of the chop logic word play is tedious word work. In Director William's conception of the comedy, the prankishness and the poetry are divorced instead of being mated...
THAT THAT is is, "pontificates the Clown, for such is the wisdom the inhabitants of Illyria wish to hear as they enwrap themselves with madness and wonders in Winthrop House's Christmas production of Twelfth Night. Words grow wanton and fools wise before the play untangles their deceits and leaves us with the feeling that whatever...
...giving of itself and hints at cloudy meanings without any apparent obligation to follow through on them. The Blood Oranges, like anything wholly out of time, can never grow. Like ripe fruit and sweet erotic fiction (which it is), it can only shrink and fade when we finally flee Illyria (which we must) and retreat into the more familiar haunts of life itself...