"But the two scenes that I did in Red Velvet I had to unlearn for this one, because I'd learned them in such a histrionic, declamatory style.
Powell says police were guilty of "histrionic gestures", though this had its comic sides, describing one occasion when police came into Downing Street one weekend "to seize our computers to use sophisticated software to interrogate them for evidence.
A senior officer in the Metropolitan police is today accused of adopting a "cavalier" approach to the power of arrest and of indulging in "histrionic gestures" during the "loans for peerages" investigation in Tony Blair's final year in office.
That was followed by histrionic threats to attack Guam, Okinawa, Hawaii and the American mainland itself.
A few days before rioting broke out on September 26th, the heads of the Fund and the Bank tussled verbally with some of the protesters' less histrionic spokesmen, while their host, Mr Havel, in the middle, tried to hold the philosophical ring.
But rather than support the Malaysian government in the first month or so, China seemed to incite the distraught families into ever fiercer, often histrionic, criticism of Malaysian officialdom, perhaps to deflect attention from the possibility that the plane might have been downed by home-grown terrorists.
In other provinces the response was less histrionic.
Among the adjectives that spring to mind are opportunistic, histrionic, irresponsible and, perhaps at best, insensitive.The trouble began on October 30th, when Giovanna Reggiani, a 47-year-old Italian naval officer's wife, was returning home along a deserted lane in northern Rome.
Prosecutors in St Petersburg say they are considering criminal charges; and in a histrionic discussion in the Duma, Irina Yarovaya, a deputy from the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, compared the Leningrad survey to "restoring Nazism .The backlash, however cynical, is emblematic of the narrowing space for allowable discussion.
The Senate is the one that matters: in the lower house, the government has a comfortable majority.To onlookers, the whole exercise may seem futile: just another example of the histrionic politicking that distracts Italy's leaders and helps to explain why the country finds it so difficult to reform.
Rafael Correa, who resembles Mr Velasco in his histrionic populism, clearly hopes that his decision on August 16th to grant Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks website, asylum at Ecuador's embassy in London and the use of its balcony to address his supporters (pictured)—will boost his chances of winning another term at an election due in February.
