Deborah Pike
Autor von The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald
Werke von Deborah Pike
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Felix (who's on exchange and is supposed to be studying something else) has made a choice of play that's ambitious. It's The Marriage of Figaro, a comedy in five acts, written in 1778 by Pierre Beaumarchais. This subversive play was banned in pre-revolutionary France because of its focus on class tensions and the limitations of rank and privilege. Most of us know this play better as Mozart's 1786 opera, which was approved for performance in Vienna because its political intent was strategically sanitised by the Italian librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. (Rulers in Europe and Britain were wary of anything inflammatory that might provoke copycat revolutions in this era). So the Da Ponte Figaro replaces the denunciation of inherited nobility with an aria about unfaithful wives. (See A Guide to The Marriage of Figaro by Hannah Nepoliva at the BBC Classical Music magazine.)
Felix's cast is a bunch of university students whose preoccupations (mirroring the mayhem in Figaro) are more often with each other than with realising the dramatic effects of a French play. But like the dramatis personae of the play and the opera, they come from very different social backgrounds and ethnicities, which spark into assumptions, entitlements, misunderstandings, rejections, and betrayals. And sometimes, intense discomfort:
At twenty, Veronika feels the chasm in so-called egalitarian Australian society:
The first disaster occurs when one of them persists with smoking in the university's rehearsal space, and they get booted out, with very little time to find another venue. Veronika, however, does a deal with her father, the orchardist whose parents fled communism in Bohemia: if the players will help with the harvest, they can do the play in the orchard. This change of venue brings her back into contact with Joshua, who's had a rough start in life and is therefore too easily dismissed as a rival by charming, handsome, rich, privileged Sebastian. Who is, as we say in Australia, 'up himself.' That doesn't stop Cassie from fancying him, even though he dismisses her too because she isn't gorgeous like Veronika. And while Veronika dallies with Sebastian, Joshua-on-the-rebound bonds with Gloria who's still under the thumb of her mother Who Would Not Approve.
You get the drift. Everybody is in love with the wrong person, but this isn't a silly romcom.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/03/04/the-players-2024-by-deborah-pike/… (mehr)