(The messenger's speech summarizing the offscreen climax is an astonishingly thorough cop-out on Shakespeare's part, my goodness, but they did the best one could with it, I think. I liked the redistribution.)
The RSC took a similar approach in the monumental eight-hour Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby—instead of translating all of Dickens' prose into dialogue, portions of it are retained to be spoken by the relevant characters, who are therefore sometimes narrating their own third-person lives through the fourth wall—and it worked very well for me there, too. It's a kind of collective narration I really enjoy. And here it gave the scene the resonance of a Greek chorus, which worked fine with all the confusingly classical references in the play.
A strange play, but there's a lot of interesting stuff to do with it.
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The RSC took a similar approach in the monumental eight-hour Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby—instead of translating all of Dickens' prose into dialogue, portions of it are retained to be spoken by the relevant characters, who are therefore sometimes narrating their own third-person lives through the fourth wall—and it worked very well for me there, too. It's a kind of collective narration I really enjoy. And here it gave the scene the resonance of a Greek chorus, which worked fine with all the confusingly classical references in the play.
A strange play, but there's a lot of interesting stuff to do with it.
Yes! I like that way of describing it.