Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Great Regulars: The second world war further encouraged

our obsession. One of the most celebrated productions of The Duchess of Malfi, at the Haymarket theatre, appeared three weeks before the German surrender in 1945, just as the pictures of the con­centration camps were appearing in the papers. "This time," wrote the critic Leah Sinanoglou Marcus, "when audiences saw the 'heap of corpses on which the final curtain falls', they did not laugh as pre-war audiences frequently had: art had imitated life with horrifying visual clarity."

from Bryan Appleyard: from The Sunday Times: Jacobean Blood

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