The Possessed over seven and a half hours. The production was surtitled in English and just wonderful theatre as we could hear the sound and rhythm of the Russian language and see the inheritors of Stanislavsky's acting tradition. Other memorable productions that year were the Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago's Guess who's Coming to Dinner and from the Ninagawa Company's Hamlet in Japanese. I did later see and reviewJohn Hurt in what was to become a definitive performance in Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape which transferred from the Gate Theatre, Dublin. In fact, the season is so eclectic ranging from theatre to circus to children's plays that it lacks a cohesive quality.
Some plays are superlative, others mediocre or worse.
1998's Measure for Measure directed by Frenchman, St phane Braunschweig was one of those occasions when I got bitten by the BITE season. This year I cannot praise the Steppenwolf Theatre of Chicago's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , too highly. Bonnie Greer, a native of Chicago and an award winning playwright, novelist and a critic, . explains in the programme how Cuckoo's Nest , Ken Kesey's novel is a work written when the US was in transition from the 1950s to the ideas revolution of the 1960s. She writes of the dichotomy of America as the home of liberty to some of her people but not others, which, as an Afro-Caribbean woman, she is in a special position to appreciate. As a dramatic piece it works very well.