"People almost never stage it this way," said Mr. Linklater, 36, who remembers the play as a frequent summer hit for Shakespeare & Company, albeit with four actors in the four parts.
Huppert, almost never off-stage, mesmerises through the use of her voice and body to demonstrate the degradations of passion but I found myself wishing we could see her applying her skill to the claustrophobic intensity of Racine's Phèdre.
Once on board, the actors said, they worried about how hard the work would be, whether it would be confusing, how they would memorize both sets of lines, which amounts to memorizing an entire play, since the brothers almost never leave the stage.
In Dallas, Lyle's performance had earned him some of the strongest reviews of his career; one newspaper called it "a striking individual triumph for this deft young player who wooed, lied, ranted, raved, cajoled, implored, threatened, and almost never left the stage during the evening".
The result is that Francesca and Robert are almost never alone on stage.
That's why we almost never go on stage to receive an award.
They dominate the play in every way (indeed, Miles almost never leaves the stage) and it's much better for their presence.
Most sports try to preserve suspense until the very end and avoid dead rubbers, but the Tour is arranged so that the last stage almost never has any effect on the outcome.
At one point, Mr. Wilson improvised a dance more than four minutes long (rehearsals almost never involve text at this stage, even when a script is available).
But the language and the staging is almost never less than absorbing and what's especially fascinating is the way the action of the play essentially constitutes the characters we come to know in Homer.
