Tiro's fictional biography spans more than a quarter of a century and draws in scores of characters.
But in Royston Vasey there are scores of characters, and all of them make Kramer look downright normal.
The scores of characters a reader meets in the novel have been reduced to 23, played by eight actors.
With multiple layers and scores of characters, the show required attentive viewing and to this day defies easy categorization.
In between, Mr. Nadas interweaves dozens of plots and the interactions of scores of characters, presenting them against the backdrop of tumultuous 20th-century Hungarian history.
To create an artistic unity out of the wide range of moods and materials included in every novel, with often several complicated plots involving scores of characters, was made even more difficult by Dickens's writing and publishing them serially.
Scores of characters mean a lot of discarded outfits, and on an afternoon in late June, just days before the players arrived, the wardrobe department busied itself with sorting the thousands of costume pieces.
It's a tale worthy of its own comic (and one of many inspirations for Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winovel novel, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay"): On the frontier of a new industry, writers and artists creating scores of characters, but publishers profiting from them.
The American photographer Cindy Sherman, arguably our best living portraitist, has spent more than three decades transforming a single model — herself — into scores of characters, ranging from the sirens who star in her iconic, late-seventies "Film Stills" to the tragicomic women of a certain age who haunt recent works.
The problem is that it's pointlessly, artlessly, thanklessly, and thoughtlessly violence, spilling gallons of blood, butchering scores of characters, and demanding that its audience ache for each and every one, without ever taking the time to make a single bit of that violence mean anything at all.
