Word: becket
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From seven years in France, Thomas a Becket returned to England in uneasy peace with his king. Four weeks later he was murdered upon the altar of Canterbury Cathedral...
...fabric of history, which T. S. Eliot stretched upon a strangely spiritual frame, is restored to a more human and traditional shape by Richard Corum's brilliant direction of Murder in the Cathedral. Corum's work gains its vigor by rejecting Eliot's theological interpretation of Becket's martyrdom. From a poetically beautiful but theatrically impossible play, he has created an intellectually indecisive drama of enormous power...
...remove all doubt of Becket's motives, the author placed the demands of the world in the mouths of four tempters, whose role was to persuade, not to portray men. The director must force these speakers to understate, and must impose evenness and unity upon them. Instead, Corum has allowed the tempters to act as individuals who have personalities of their own instead of intellectual pawns who play Eliot's spiritual game. Only Richard Silberg remains impersonally persuasive; Philip Alston Stone, Stephen Kennedy, and Andreas Teuber have created personalities for themselves (in Teuber's case, and Eliot's lines...
Curiously, The Power and the Glory was taped in a tremendous hurry, unusual even for television. Finishing the Broadway run of Becket last spring, Olivier told Susskind he would be available for only eight days before sailing home to England. That was a total of 192 hours, and the cast was on-camera for 130 of them. A strict believer in the authority of the director (in this case, Marc Daniels), Olivier did his job with quiet docility, making minor requests: he had his "brandy" changed from Coca-Cola to tea. But he soon became as exhausted as the fugitive...
...polished bronze reliquary containing a portrait of the Emperor Barbarossa. In another was a praying Madonna done in mosaics by an artist who might have received his training in Byzantium. There was a robe that originally belonged to a Moorish king but was used by Thomas a Becket as a chasuble. Thus had the crosscurrents of civilization met to be harmonized in a single style, as if the artists involved had all beheld the same vision...