Word: bagnold
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...Broadway THE CHINESE PRIME MINISTER. In a triumph of style over substance, this drawing-room comedy pours some intellectual eyewash about old age as if it were Dom Pérignon. But Playwright Enid Bagnold writes with unfailing grace and literacy, and Margaret Leighton is an actress who can do no wrong...
...Chinese Prime Minister is an urbane liar of a play. In a triumph of style over substance, it serves its mental hash like Beluga caviar, pours its intellectual eyewash like Dom Pérignon. This sleight-of-hand artistry succeeds for two reasons. Playwright Enid Bagnold loves the English language with rare fidelity, and in the present semi-illiterate state of the U.S. stage, pure English makes an irresistible lover for an audience. Equally indispensable is an actress who can do no wrong from first entrance to final curtain. Margaret Leighton's eyes are wounds of inner pain...
...what Playwright Bagnold, who is 74, meant to write about, but unwittingly, or so it seems, her play is about the youth complex. The notion of a woman of 70 setting out to find the "real me" would be ludicrous and pathetic if it were not camouflaged by Bagnold's word incense and Leighton's stage magic. What the Margaret Leighton character wants is not to accept the past but to erase it, to be 17 again with all its romantic second chances, or else to live where age enjoys the prestige of youth, symbolized by a mythical...
...COMEDIES: British humor sometimes fails to function cisatlantically, but five British comedies are having a go at Broadway this season. Semi-Detached (Oct. 7) is a mad knitting of woolly middle-class values in English suburbia. Enid Bagnold's The Chinese Prime Minister, not yet produced in London, is about an old actress facing assorted personal problems, including a husband who turns up after a 29-year absence, and stars Margaret Leighton (January). Greatly popular on the West End last year were The Private Ear and The Public Eye-two thematically related one-acters by Peter Shaffer, author...
...Prize for Susan Glaspell in 1931, showed us some writing that could not get by in the theatre today; but the story, based on the mysterious life of poetess Emily Dickinson, is inherently dramatic and playworthy. A woman also wrote the group's next offering, The Chalk Garden. Enid Bagnold's play about two interlocking struggles is a good deal better than Miss Glaspell...