The pantomime tradition and folk-tale quality of the ballet show Mr. Martins's gift for delineating personality through movement (unsurprising since he was raised on the buoyant, warm characters of the Bournonville tradition in his native Denmark).
But under the buoyant veneer, our characters become deeply embroiled in cover-ups, sexual intrigues and the resurgence of Mosley's fascism.
Her soulful portrayal of Cleo, a young Mixtec woman who serves a white, middle-class family in Mexico City, conveyed the character's buoyant spirit and weary burdens with delicate stoicism.
These relationships may sound hopelessly somber, but they're enacted with buoyant theatricality as the characters probe the limits of identity, trying to discern the rules for being a child, a dancer, a husband, a wife.
Without the benefit of the novel's future timeline to keep the buoyant optimism of its characters in check, there's little sense that these Losers will go on to live scarred adult lives, or that their memories of the ugly business witnessed in Derry's sewers may fade from their minds but ring unfinished in their souls for the next 27 years.
In what should surely prove a star-making engagement, Ms. Righter sang with rich tone, focus and agility, and assumed her character with a buoyant physicality and impetuousness.
Hilda is also a very appealing character — perceptive and buoyant — the kind that points out plants emerging through cracks in the pavement, and says things like "I appreciate discreet things" and "That's not a good reason for being rude".
"Hav Plenty" may be a featherweight social comedy without a political bone in its body, but its characters are refreshingly buoyant.
By bookending his drama with the buoyant scene in which the characters meet up as students to found the magazine, Gray traces the distance from idealism to cynicism, and sends us home with a bellyful of the bittersweetness we know is in store.
