Word: upper
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Most people know of drawing room comedies simply as a genre concerning the personal relations of the upper classes, a genre made famous today, ironically, by its own parodists like Oscar Wilde. More than a simple genre of theater, however, the drawing room comedy created a revolution in the history of dramatic presentation. Born out of the witty, language-heavy Restoration comedies like those of William Congreve, the drawing room comedy grew in the early 1700s into exactly what its title implies-a comedy presented in a private drawing room...
...Restoration period such private affairs were balanced by theaters like the Globe which attracted everyone from shop apprentices to the nobility or by traveling companies of players performing for more geographically isolated audiences. With the development of the drawing room comedy, however, theater became the exclusive plaything of the upper classes, a form of aristocratic diversion rather than mass entertainment. It became as much a status symbol as a type of art. It should come as little surprise that almost no memorable plays were written for the 200 years of theater's self-sequesterment in the homes of the rich...
...units and a detachment of British paratroopers. The big surprise is that Colonel Koroma has switched sides this time, and is fighting to defend the government. But the problem is there may be doubts over how long he'll stay aboard if the other side appears to get the upper hand and he's offered a deal. So it's total chaos: The U.N. doesn't even know where its own people are, the government troops are untrustworthy and Koroma could always turn. The Kamajor are the only ones who'll stand and fight. They're a fierce warrior tribe...
...perfect specimen of the genus 'peach,'" says dashing reprobate Rowley Flint (Sean Penn) to the truly peachy Mary Pantin (Kristin Scott Thomas) in this stilted version of a Somerset Maugham trifle about the moneyed class inconvenienced by lust and Fascism in 1938 Florence. It's the sort of stiff-upper-Brit badinage that one may think one is nostalgic for, until one hears it played straight in a film with no glamour (the cinematography makes everyone look blotchy), urgency or sense. Really, my pet, it's all just too terribly terribly...terrible...
...chinoiserie. She averts her eyes. Perhaps it would have been an entirely average house to grow up in, except for the troubles that began when Katie was 13. One day she entered a teen chat room on AOL, and all at once her adolescence became unlike those of her upper-class conservative teen peers...