(Written scene titles continue to appear, but they now convey no essential information: if you ignored them, you could still follow the silly plots).
Vogel's deft dialogue and creative chronology go a long way to hold our interest, constantly shifting the power dynamics, but the double-entendre scene titles feel belabored, and the comic tone of Li'l Bit's crass family veers into caricature.
Hare drops the Brechtian scene titles and substantially cuts down the text: the problematic last scene, in which Galileo's former pupil sneaks the secretly copied book across the border, is reduced to six spoken words.
In the half-century since he wrote, Brecht's staging innovations (scene titles, direct narration, interspersed songs and carnival scenes) have been integrated into the language of contemporary theatre.
Projecting scene titles on a backing video screen has rather the opposite effect here; screens are so much a part of contemporary life that this lulls and feels overly familiar.
With all those media going simultaneously (sometimes it was difficult to know where to look), it would have been helpful to see the scene titles on one of the screens too.
It's difficult to argue too much, however, with a tactic that keeps playgoers apprised at every turn of Mr. Heffernan's keenly sensitized portrayal, Edward's downward spiral made doubly plain by scene titles informing us of the grim trajectory of the piece as it is happening.
From a stage decorated with front page newspaper headlines that brilliantly serve as scene titles to dramatic lighting choices, period costumes and human-made sound effects, the play succeeds across the board.
In this new film, the story is told formally, using a narrator (Kei Sato) and between-scene titles to maintain a studied distance.
The "walking sim" gets so much stick as a game concept, but in their use of form, space, narrative and mise-en-scene, titles like Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, Gone Home and Fragments of Him are challenging ideas of inhabitation, embodiment and interactivity in ways that mainstream FPS titles haven't really done in years.
