5.Dramatize the following situations.

1. You have just returned from the theatre. The members of your family want to know your impression.

2. Yesterday you had a visit to the Variety Theatre. The performance was a failure. Discuss it with your parents.

3. You’ve just seen the first act of “The Nutcracker”. Share your impression with the friend during an intermission.

4. Your husband likes to go to the theatre only for the sake of a bar. Assure him that there is something more to admire.

5. Your boy-friend (girl-friend) hates the idea of going to the first night. Talk him into going to any premiere.

6. You are a theatregoer, but your close friend is not fond of theatre. You invite your friend to see the play which you have seen many times and want to see again. But your friend refuses. Persuade him (he) to see this performance.

6. Round table “Theatre Today”. Present any theatre (Russian, foreign, local) according to the following plan:

• The official name

• The type of the theatre (subsidized or commercial)

• The brief history

• The emblem

• The theatre company (the director, the actors, their honours and awards)

• The types and list of productions that run at the theatre (including the most popular ones)

• The zest of the chosen theatre

• Problems

Reading

7. Read Text 17. What issues does this review high light?

8. Underline the epithets used in the review, give their definitions. Text 17. The importance of beeing earnest at regent’s park

by Charles Spencer

(A delightful open-air production of Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece persuades us to see and hear the play afresh)

The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) is the most perfect high comedy in the English language. Unfortunately, it has become almost too familiar, so that connoisseurs are often anticipating or indeed silently mouthing the greatest lines before they are delivered. Even a play as brilliant as this can lose something of its allure with repetition.

All credit then to director Irina Brown who in this delightful production persuades us to see and hear the play afresh. It helps that we are in the open air, even on a grey and drizzly night, for the breeze, birdsong and rustling leaves banish the feeling that we are watching a dusty museum piece.

Brown refuses to stage the play, as is normally the case, as if it were an almost naturalistic piece of late Victoriana. Wilde’s dialogue is the very reverse of naturalistic – it is epigrammatic, showily artificial, and blessed with a timeless sense of mischief, daring and wit that has never been equalled, though Stoppard and Orton have come close.

The stage in Kevin Knight’s design is dominated by an elegant curving ramp on which the characters often enter and exit an almost bare white stage. A large mirror reflects the audience back at itself and an ensemble of servants aggrievedly eavesdrop on their masters. The cigarette-case argument between Algernon and Jack turns into a rambunctious physical fight, with chases round, and daring leaps over, a circular table.

In the second act, set outdoors in Wilde’s original, scores of rose blooms cover the stage through which the cast have carefully to negotiate their moves.

Some might dismiss all this as an infernal liberty with Wilde’s masterpiece. I believe it is a breath of fresh air that allows us to experience the play anew. The dazzling, dizzying dialogue in which Wilde treats “all trivial things very seriously and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality” zings, sings and stings in this production”.

Dominic Tighe’s Algernon is insufferably and hilariously smug as he wolfs down cucumber sandwiches while Ryan Kiggell’s Jack brings a delicious booming pomposity to the stage. Susan Wooldridge, in one of the most preposterous hats I have ever seen, slyly plays Lady Bracknell as if the old trout were secretly in on the joke of her own authoritarian outrageousness, wincing as if physically attacked when she hears the squalid details of lost babies at London railway termini. The famous handbag is merely the straw that breaks this aristocratic camel’s back. Jo Herbert and Lucy Briggs Owen duel with lethal verbal panache as Gwendolen and Cecily, the latter bringing a peaches-and-cream complexion and a palpable sexuality to the stage, the latter a rare quality in Wilde. And there is touching pathos from Julie Legrand as the bereft Miss Prism.

It is hard to imagine a finer entertainment for an enchanted summer night.

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