At times, the group patterning feels a little thin and reliant on the moves of individual dancers, but there are some stunning, offbeat sets – one, in particular, in Onqotô, slaps and bounces bodies against each other and on the floor, as two couples get it on in contrasting gentle and then passionate embrace.
At only 33, Simon Jenkins, even then a passionate writer about London issues, was his natural, groomed successor.
He was a terrific, silver-tongued salesman, several former colleagues recall, and by then a passionate American too.
Roger Livesey plays General Clive Wynne-Candy, first as a pop-eyed old reactionary, and then a passionate young soldier: it's a moving study of how we grow old.
But Wilde's play gives us something altogether more flagrant: his Salome is violently aroused by Jochanaan (Wilde restores the Baptist's Hebrew name), demands his head after he has rejected her, and then makes passionate love to it, kissing the dead lips of the man who, in life, treated her with contempt.
And then, being passionate and personally invested in that.
And therein lies the issue: if you won't "die or kill" -- if you won't "fall on your sword" -- then how passionate are you really?
Then, a passionate 23-year-old chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), John Lewis, was already a seasoned civil rights activist -- with fractures and scars as evidence -- and caused controversy when an advance copy of his speech was circulated.
"People were more passionate then.
"We were young and passionate then," she says.
Abi-Saab allowed that memory can be distorted by intervening impressions, and he said, "We were all much more passionate then.
