Word: victorianism
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Translation from stage play to film meant opening it up, in movie jargon --adding exterior scenes--but the center of the action is still the kitchen of a batty old Victorian house belonging to the sisters' dying grandfather. The company bought a nondescript house on Southport's North Caswell Street and added $200,000 worth of Victorian folderol: two towers, a gazebo, a side porch, green shutters and purple-and-yellow stained-glass windows...
...second act, however, Victoria (now played by Loranger) proves to be the pivotal character rather than Clive. Whereas the man who ran the household in Victorian times controlled the sexual manueverings and perferences of those in his household, the daughter/emerging liberated woman oversees...
...comes as little surprise. For the play is all about repression and conforming to sexual expectations, or not. Every character in Cloud 9 is trying to break free of repression and act only as he or she wishes. Mired in having to hide perversities behind closed doors in the Victorian age, the characters have no hope of achieving any freedom...
...homosexual Edward who enjoys being passive is played by Zelman who formerly played Betty, the obedient Victorian wife. The young Edward who vascillated in the first act between wishing he could play with dolls or be with the men becomes transformed into the adult Victoria who also seems unable to decide her own destiny. And Betty becomes more self-confident as the woman who plays the domineering Mrs. Sanders in the first act takes on the role of Betty in the second...
...Harold Skimpole, the "damaged young man . . . who had undergone some unique process of depreciation" in Bleak House, was the poet Leigh Hunt. A boasting letter from Charles Dickens is exhibit A: "The likeness is astonishing. I don't think it could be more like (Hunt) himself." Dickens tempered his Victorian portrait with humor, but George Eliot was made of sterner stuff. Apologizing to a clergyman who had recognized an unflattering likeness in Scenes of Clerical Life, she explained that she had thought he was dead...