Though they have nothing to show for their years of wandering, they still feel that there are marvellous times ahead.
There are marvellous clips from the early films, from Murder a la Mod and Greetings, a surprise success.
But textually, linguistically, there are marvellous happenings from page one, when Cecily's heart "bounced like a trout".
The Boston show cogently tracks stylistic evolutions, from the Bronze Age to the Hellenic and beyond (there's marvellous stuff from the Etruscans).
There are marvellous if unsurprising cheeses at £3.50 a pop, with walnut bread toasted to within a nanosecond of its life; and a spicy, deliciously granular fig jam.
There are marvellous visual jokes, like the primitive telephone by which Gilbert receives coded message about box-office receipts, and the dialogue is consistently elegant and funny.
And, yes, there are marvellous performances, plus fascinating characters whose motives aren't yet clear (what's the sinister millionaire Masterson all about then, and Donaldson?) It's beautiful to look at and artfully crafted.
There are marvellous things here, and almost always a sense of strain as the dramatist works for something highly original, a tragicomic form that breaks and remakes itself, breaks and remakes characters' lives, believably.
There are marvellous still lifes here: a particularly vivacious death's head on an open book, jawing its last words; a stupendous painting of a knife, all Euclidean incisiveness; a drawing of a tomato plant, in counterintuitive blue crayon, that is supposed to illustrate wartime deprivation but bursts with celebration instead.
"The players left blood out there and the fans were marvellous.
