| That production, which is in the Maggie Smith Collection, showed me things about how the play works that I had never seen before, even though I'd seen several productions. But all of those had been revisionist productions. In some ways (though not all), the production with Smith is more traditional, and I realized something surprising: If the characters in the last act seem happy (they had seemed miserable in every other production I had seen), it's far more powerful and makes them much more hateful than if they seem to hate each other and are looking forward to miserable futures. |
