Yet, however hollow-cheeked, breathless and consumptive he may appear, Friend's performance is a sickly as his character coming across as an intensely dislikeable spoilt brat.
The son of a dour Lutheran pastor, he was a sickly child (a character fit for Munch, in fact) who saw the world framed through the windows of the wooden parsonage.
While a small circle of his friends talked about his wit, perseverance and inspiration, in popular memory he was a "sickly man of weak character", egocentric, bitter due to his failed rivalry with Mickiewicz.
The idea of a chocolate river, always a problem when staging this story, has distinctly uncomfortable moments as dispensable characters disappear into its sickly depths.
Bathed in cold concrete and dishwater complexions, "Cost of a Soul" unfolds in smoky bars and grimy rooms, its characters illuminated by the sickly wash of swaying ceiling lights.
Its three characters — Adolph (Tom Burke), a sickly and sensitive artist; Tekla (Anna Chancellor), his much older wife; and Gustav (Owen Teale), a mysterious, insinuating stranger with compromised ulterior motives — meet in pairs, never all at once, as power ebbs and flows among them.
Type I: sickly outfits that can't spare the cash.
Marvel's film, which will arrive in North American theaters on July 22, is set in that period and focuses on the character's origin as a sickly guy who, after being rejected for enlistment, is transformed through science into a secret military weapon.
In these plays the British characters are typically weak and sickly (Tim Crouch's "England") or cynical and ineffectual (David Hare's "Vertical Hour"), and they are in thrall with the Americans who, in the case of "Drunk Enough," demand unquestioning devotion.
