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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BADDIE ISSUES
\"Wicked\" and \"Gladiator II.\"
LET'S MAKE A DEAL
\"Death Becomes Her\" and \"Burnout Paradise.\"
ANTI HEROES
\"The Franchise,\" on HBO.
FELLOW-TRAVELLERS
The surprisingly sunny origins of the Frankfurt School.
NOW YOU SEE ME
John Singer Sargent's strange, slippery portraits of an art dealer's family.
PARIS FRIEND - SHUANG XUETAO
Xiaoguo had a terror of thirst, so he kept a glass of water on the table beside his hospital bed. As soon as it was empty, he asked me to refill it. I wanted to warn him that this was unhealthy - guzzling water all night long puts pressure on the kidneys, and pissing that much couldn't be good for his injury. He was tall, though, so I decided his insides could probably cope.
WILD SIDE
Is Lake Tahoe's bear boom getting out of hand?
GETTING A GRIP
Robots learn to use their hands.
WITHHOLDING SEX FROM MY WIFE
In the wake of [the] election, progressive women, who are outraged over Donald Trump's victory at the ballot box, have taken to social media with public, vengeful vows of chastity. - The Free Press.
DEADLINE EXTENSION
Old age, reborn.