Search results
they are spying for. The flashbacks they have from their previous life interpolate the homeland they left many years ago into their current one. Aliens in America and purporting to be ordinary American citizens although they are the very opposite, they, like Viola, live under the constant threat of their identity being discovered. There is yet a further dimension to their lack of a proper place that aligns this TV drama with Shakespeare’s festive comedy. Repeatedly sent out to discover the secret desires of the US government in the ongoing nuclear arms race, the
to choose between this ‘Scottish’ scene and other nuclear wastelands characteristic of recent Hollywood cinematic outings. We are, in fact, paradoxically reminded of one of the constructions of Scotland circulating in the wake of the failed referendum bill; that is, an audience is presented with a fallen world robbed of a redeeming distinctiveness. Despite his entertainment of signifiers of Scotland
to display a verisimilar fake hand (a bit of business that did not always work); later in 5.2, a great deal of blood flowed from Chiron and Demetrius who were suspended upside-down. In the final sequence, Titus killed Tamora savagely, and Saturninus shot Titus with a pistol, the only such weapon in the production which was designed for a ‘Road Warriors’ post-nuclear holocaust look. Given the outdoor theatre and the small size of the company (a core of thirteen actors, with guest artists playing the clown), effects
even more so from those ‘Latin histories’ which Castellucci cited as crucial to the production, particularly their accounts of the devastation of Philippi, here rendered in quasi-nuclear terms, so that Kennedy finally called the production not so much postmodern as ‘neo-expressionist, iconoclastic, and aberrant’, ‘a subjective rendering of [the play’s] recessive themes’ (355). Such a production could
choice to locate the production in Fascist Italy, this setting was still designed to underline the relevance of the play’s treatment of violence to contemporary hostilities throughout the world: ‘We’ve had wars of late in Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda, but … [b]ecause we’re not as worried about being attacked by nuclear missiles, we have a chance to look at the essence of those wars. They’re very clan-oriented, very much family against family, which [is what] this play is about’ (quoted in McMahon, A5). By emphasising the ‘clan
into the not-yet-day of gulls’ screeching, squawking, croaking, quacking, clucking rapidly all around the housetop amount to a single verbless sentence: ‘Probably not.’ These words initially instil a feeling of great calm, as if Freud is reassuring me: it might never happen. Probably not . You wonder if the world is coming to an end, on your phone last night you read in the newspaper online that the US has just ‘dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat’ somewhere in Afghanistan, you put the phone to charge on a small table beside your desk (only now
inseparable from Redgrave’s own politics of emergent feminism and established anti-nuclear activism, and, as she understood and experienced it, of life and love. In her autobiography, she revealed that Michael Elliott had taken her for lunch on the day of the première. Expecting bland words of thanks and encouragement, she was in for a shock: ‘Vanessa, the whole production is going to be a failure. You won
quote (‘Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’) was recycled, and the programme connected the production’s gender preoccupations with contemporary eco-feminist and, in this instance, anti-nuclear agendas, with an excerpt from novelist Ian McEwan’s introduction to his libretto for Michael Berkeley’s eco-feminist, anti-nuclear oratorio Or Shall We Die? , which had been performed
circumstances of the writer. 19 The popularity of advice books influences Catherine Belsey’s argument that an ‘ideal of the affective nuclear family in early modern England’ emerged out of the religious, political and economic upheavals of the period. 20 Belsey, who finds expression of this change in the cultural products of the period, focuses upon Jacobean funerary architecture and contemporary English drama for her discussion. She sees a Protestant
follows what Hutchings calls a realist approach in terms of visual style and cinematography. Its setting is the eerily familiar small town in the middle of nowhere – Los Alamos, New Mexico, in this particular case – but the temporal setting is made specific by Reagan’s so-called ‘Evil Empire’ speech from 1983 addressed to the National Association of Evangelicals, broadcast on television screens within the diegesis. While the speech is famous for its rejection of equal responsibility in the nuclear arms race, designating the Soviet Union as the evil empire and the