"The problems lie within the book," says the Guardian's Michael Billington, pointing to Lloyd Webber's decision to transpose the phantom character to Coney Island, 10 years after the original, where he has somehow (despite being deformed, mad, violent and probably dead) established a thriving theatrical business.
So my phantom child remained just that--a phantom, a wish, and an unborn spirit.
He has long been populating Shakespeare's plays with phantoms: characters who quietly appear, as if in the mind's eye, when others speak or think of them.
The zest and innocence of the two girls, random casualties of war, provide its unifying pulse, while Sibaso remains a phantom — more a personification of evil than a full-fledged character.
The United Nations Security Council, like a character in a Beckett play, has been waiting for a phantom -- a resolution from the United States declaring that Iraq has not disarmed.
In "The Comforters," a young woman recovering from a breakdown finds that she is a character in a novel that is being written on a phantom typewriter that only she can hear.
In an 1845 letter he referred to one subject's "Bad Spirit," a "phantom" with which he was struggling, the way one of his characters might with an unholy nemesis, like Wilkins Micawber with the demonically 'umble Uriah Heep.
He sees terrible phantoms -- "phantom flames, phantom deformities, a phantom buddy".
Penelope was not a phantom.
