Juliet Stevenson’s voice is one of the most frightening things I ever saw. In April, 2021, with much of New York performance still under pandemic interdict, Simon Stephens’s socially distanced adaptation of José Saramago’s “Blindness” came to the Daryl Roth Theatre. The show was basically a radio drama: audience members sat in pairs six feet apart, wearing headphones, listening to a recording of Stevenson telling a horror story about a plague. Her vocal timbre has a supercompressed quality, as suspenseful as a steel spring. In a dark room, in a dark year, her disembodied voice and its magnificent tension leaped straight to my optic nerve, making phantoms flicker inside my eyelids, sonic energy becoming light.
In “The Doctor,” a British production now at the Park Avenue Armory, the inthe-f lesh Juliet Stevenson (a compact ramrod in the Glenda Jackson mold) maintains that sense of matter under strain. Wisely, her director-playwright, Robert Icke, exploits it every way he can. The two-hour-and-forty-five-minute show keeps Stevenson onstage for almost its entire length, even during the intermission—the minimalist gray carpeted turntable stage, designed by Hildegard Bechtler, rotates, slowly, beneath her feet. (The room is her autoclave.) A voice like Stevenson’s can make an argument take on heat and power, thrust and excitement. Of course, the wheels might fall off that argument. The play might grind itself into the dirt. But Stevenson’s motive force keeps pushing the thing whether it moves or not, combative energy becoming, somehow, pure fight.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July 03, 2023-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July 03, 2023-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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President for Sale - A survey of today's political ads.
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.
LIFE ADVICE WITH ANIMAL ANALOGIES
Go with the flow like a dead fish.
CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS
The masterly musical as mblages of Charles Ives
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
How the Brothers Grimm sought to awaken a nation.
THE ARTIFICIAL STATE
A different kind of machine politics.
THE HONEST ISLAND GREG JACKSON
Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come.
THE SHIPWRECK DETECTIVE
Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure-without leaving dry land.
THE HOME FRONT
Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war.
SYRIA'S EMPIRE OF SPEED
Bashar al-Assad's regime is now a narco-state reliant on sales of amphetamines.
TUCKER EVERLASTING
Trump's favorite pundit takes his show on the road.