Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...STOPPARD is an irreverent playwright, but the Dunster House production of two Stoppard farces almost expires beneath an overly-reverent treatment of the author's script...
Unfortunately, the production fails to realize that the dialogue in itself is the attraction of these plays, not the development of characters or progress of the story. While After Magritte is tolerably brief, The Real Inspector Hound, performed with the same cast, ponderously follows every twist in the script...
...play's direction is, on the whole, intelligent and, unexaggerated. Director Oded Salomy avoids the difficulties posed by the script's Britishisms by setting his version in Boston rather than Pinter's London suburbs. The two lovers meet in a house in Belmont, instead of Wessex, and the two men bring speakers to Harvard and Yale, not Oxford and Cambridge. The flat does not need Hoovering, it needs vacuuming...
Technically, Weapon is beautifully shot and well paced. The only component in this cinematographic speed machine that ever misfires is the script, which could just as easily have been written in Japanese or Greek for all the sense it makes...
...Your Ears is a view from outside, cool as Orton's craft. But Ken Russell has always been caged inside the beautiful mad creatures he imagines artists to be. No distance, no irony, no coherence, no prisoners. And no surprise that Russell now turns to Gothic, Stephen Volk's script about the famous night in 1816 that Byron (Gabriel Byrne) spent with his mistress Claire Clairmont (Myriam Cyr), his lover John William Polidori (Timothy Spall), his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley (Julian Sands) and Shelley's wife-to-be Mary Godwin (Natasha Richardson). From that spectral evening emerged Mary's idea...