Fathers made anxious for their daughters' safety are "alert to the noirish possibilities of the situation", a character is struck by "something contrived about the atmosphere of the house", and a morgue attendant's voice is "laden with portents and comic doom".
An eerie atmosphere is contrived by a violent artificial lighting though the scene apparently takes place in the open, on the planks of some platform overlooking a deep blue space.
But if the Globe crowd erupts with a spontaneous roar I've rarely heard at any theater, that speaks to the difference between one production that has to contrive a party atmosphere to keep going and another that just naturally rocks.
To fuel the play's atmosphere of hysteria, Strindberg contrived to keep John and his heroine alone together so that they could have sex.
The organisers in their wisdom have contrived to give the event a little bit of the atmosphere offered by border villages in Fermanagh during the Troubles.
It's just that Flanagan (with co-writers Jeff Seidman and Jeff Howard) contrives a piercingly unpleasant atmosphere of fear.
For all its red herrings and contrived curlicues, the novel's tale immerses the reader in the fetid, overripe atmosphere of Vienna, limning the dark, chaotic impulses that lurk beneath its facade of stuffy bourgeois morality.
MANCHESTER, N.H. — There's a belief among some that the New Hampshire primary is nothing but a media spectacle, one in which out-of-state supporters, protesters, members of the news media and tourists engage in a contrived sound-stage ideal of a "quaint small-town democracy" in a circuslike atmosphere.
In its L.A.-noir atmosphere, as in its knottily woven plot, it may remind readers of Christopher Nolan's ingeniously contrived mystery film "Memento" (2000), whose initial violent scene is in fact its climax, from which, in reverse chronology, enigmatic vignettes follow as a man afflicted with anterograde amnesia tries to discover who has killed his wife.
In the tick-tock tempo of the action and in the whole hot and dusty atmosphere (which is handsomely described in outdoor scenery), the notion of malevolence is captured too.Thus the currently contrived conclusion that the guide has fallen in love with the dame and that possibly the shooting was accidental is completely stupid and false.
