Word: austen
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That prayer was not answered last week as the current theatrical bibliomania engulfed Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. If First Impressions resembles any fair lady, it is Jenny, the girl who could not make up her mind. The show wavers between Austen, Burrows and music-hall burlesque, and only the elegant Regency settings and costumes of Peter Larkin and Alvin Colt seem serenely self-assured...
...plot is still basic Austen. The aristocratic Mr. Darcy (Farley Granger) falls in love with Elizabeth (Polly Bergen), one of the five Bennet sisters. She dislikes his arrogance as sincerely as he dislikes her middleclass, mercenary mother. It is a classic case of love at first slight. As Darcy, Hollywood's Farley Granger is the stuff telephone poles are made of. TV's Polly Bergen makes a winning Elizabeth, but the ex-Pepsi Cola Girl seems to be selling her part rather than playing it. As Mrs. Bennet, the huntress of five carriage-trade husbands, Hermione Gingold growls...
...said Britain's Home Secretary and Lord Privy Seal, "that my destiny lies in the field of social reform-and I am happy in it." To those who know the cool and acid-tongued Richard Austen Butler well, the philosophic tone of the first part of that remark must have seemed odd; Rab Butler has shown not the slightest sign that he has given up hope of one day living at 10 Downing Street. But no one could have taken issue with the straightness of the second part. Probably not since Wilberforce has Britain had a more dedicated reformer...
...joke on Coates is that he knows his Austen far too well. He keeps trying to steer the characters in The Watsons in "original" directions, for fear they will grow too like the characters in other Austen novels-until honest imitation melts into irresistible parody. It all goes to show the difficulties confronting an author who has been raised in the world of Thurber, Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett and must yet deal deadpan with ploys (such as swoons and blushes) of which he has had no experience...
...Watsons has two virtues. One is purely malicious: bits of it can be read aloud to fanatical Janeites to see if they can guess the true author. The other virtue is that Author Coates has managed to recapture much of the attitude to love and life that Jane Austen once expressed in a single short query: "For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn...