Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...trouble, though, was that Shakespeare, drawing on an episode in Boccaccio's Decameron. foisted on us a plot that is at once preposterous and poorly constructed. To which we must add that his heroine, Helena, lacks motivation, and his supposed hero. Bertram, lacks all semblance of virtue...
...ringidentification gimmick, so skillfully handled in Twelfth Night, is here even more awkwardly managed than in The Merchant of Venice. And interlarded along the way is another story involving the vile coward Parolles-a plot that has no organic connection, with the main tale...
Michael Kahn, eschewing a tragicomic view of the play, has pushed his production along the gamut to pure comedy and at times beyond this in the direction of farce. The advantage accruing from this is that audiences will readily accept, under the guise of comedy, the kind of silly plot that they would not swallow in a serious work. But there is a disadvantage too: a comic interpretation tends to prevent the audience from realizing that grave issues are being extensively dealt with in this play. Kahn made his choice, and has proven its viability beyond a doubt...
...plot is laced with the usual colonial tensions and pretensions: Hoxworth feuds with a polyglut of races while his pineapple princess (Geraldine Chaplin) goes quietly mad. Every time the pace slackens, which is often, someone goes to sea, either to pick up field hands or to transport lepers to Molokai. The incessant ebb and flow is intended as a metaphor for the turbulent tides of Hawaiian life. But the real metaphor here is the pineapple, which in the good old gangster days was a synonym for bomb...
...machine nor a recording angel, but a human voice sounding with its own shifting intonations in the ear and heart of the reader. Describing the peculiar discrepancy between apparent message and feeling in Forster's novels, Lionel Trilling observed: " 'Wash ye, make yourselves clean,' says the plot, and the manner murmurs, 'If you can find the soap...