There is a remarkable nimbleness of style, a balancing act of tone, in Voltaire, which is hard to bring off on stage. When you speak the words out loud, the effect is very different from when you read them. So one needs to do something new with a stage performance, not simply 'tell the story'.
Mark RavenhillCandide is one of those books I read when I was young and that I come back to regularly.
Mark RavenhillRereading Candide, I was struck by the link between optimism and the optimal, the idea that we have been placed in this optimal world rather than some other.
Mark RavenhillThere is the question of language. Although the play [Candid] is not written in strict verse form, there is an underlying beat of rhyming couplets, with echoes of Pope and the tradition of eighteenth-century philosophical verse.
Mark Ravenhill