It took her three years, and it is a triumph: a highly wrought, rhetorical piece contrasting the Taliban's empty words and promises of martyrdom with the physical reality of their deeds.
Yet these moments are delivered as rhetorical set pieces; she never seems driven from one statuesque or writhing pose to another.
This scenario — hyperarticulate people shut in a room yapping at one another — suggests a movie adapted from the stage, as do the over-deliberate cadences, rhetorical set pieces and compressed, rather contrived emotional intensity of the drama.
And then answer your own question by borrowing her opinion that Mirren's emotional scenes "are delivered as rhetorical set pieces; she never seems driven from one statuesque or writhing pose to another".
The National staging represents a huge step forward for the young director, Polly Findlay, working for the first time in the capacious Olivier auditorium: a tricky space that turns out to be aptly suited to the play's large-scale emotions and sizable rhetorical set pieces.
Last weekend it was reported that Mr. Obama used on the presidential campaign trail a rhetorical set-piece first spoken by Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, a friend and co-chairman of his campaign.
Will they ever be ashamed enough of themselves for that?" His anti-Eliot diatribe, which might make even Tom Paulin blanch, is a rhetorical set-piece, a prose poem of invective.
The document's shift in purpose, from one-time rhetorical set-piece to widely disseminated tract, is reminiscent of Ralph Waldo Emerson, to whose famous addresses secular sermons without exception every American essayist, for good or ill, owes one thing or another.
The most deliberately old-fashioned of all Shakespeare's histories, it is written in often rhymed verse, it repeatedly uses words that were already archaic in 1595, and it consists mainly of rhetorical set-pieces, without a single earthy pub scene to set them off.
Still further, it consists in part in three speeches, at least the first of which ("Lysias' speech") is a rhetorical set-piece.
