ABSTRACT
In Michael Boyd's 1994 production of The Broken Heart for the Royal Shakespeare Company, this strong, specific image is pulled out of the text and underlined for the audience through the use of frozen tableaux. The upstage shutters are raised to reveal an elaborate banquet table - a celebratory wedding feast (fig. 1). Crowning the centre-piece of the table is the delicate figure of a swan. Later in the performance, the shutters are again raised to reveal the same banquet, but with a crucial difference - the food is rotting and decaying, the sound of buzzing flies fills the air, and the swan is hung by the neck, dripping blood from its disembowelled body onto the wasted scene (fig. 2).1
