GOD'S CANDLE:

REVIEW: of Fahrenheit 451 (HEDY WEISS, October 14, 2002, Chicago Sun-Times)

"Fahrenheit 451," Ray Bradbury's stage version of his own 1953 novel, is the first of this season's two Exchange productions, and a few days ago I joined an audience of students from six different local high schools to see it.

Most of the kids had already read the popular cautionary tale by the Illinois-bred, Los Angeles-based Bradbury in their classrooms--a story about a society in which possessing books is illegal, and in which the principal mission of firemen is to burn them so that individual thought can be kept to a minimum. The students' rapt attention throughout the 90-minute show easily smashed all the usual assumptions about the inability of live theater to grab the young, the restless and the electronically tuned. In fact, director Dado's largely unadorned and straightforward staging (played out on the slightly altered set for the current mainstage hit, "The Time of Your Life") is dense in both language and complexity of ideas. Yet the audience didn't miss a single laugh, behavioral twist or literary reference.

There's one reference in the book that I had to look up and it's marvelous. When the firemen go to burn an old lady's books she lights herself on fire and says (the quote may not be precise):

[W]e shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England as I trust shall never be put out.

These were the words of Hugh Latimer, the Protestant Bishop of Worcester, put to the torch with his friend Nicholas Ridley in 1555, by Queen Mary. His quote in full:

Be of good cheer, Master Ridley, and play the man, for we shall this day light such a candle in England as I trust by God's grace shall never be put out.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 14, 2002 10:22 AM