Word: beckets
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...Murder in the Cathedral is a play about a man who is given the chance to realize his dreams, to make the idea and the reality one. Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, had renounced political power and the friendship of the king when he had been appointed leader of the Church of England. His position gave him influential leverage in the politics of the era and weighted his every action toward the direction of history. Eliot's play opens with Becket's return to England after a seven-year exile in France and closes with his murder at the hands...
...ELIOT'S highly stylized and rigidly structured form of drama seems at first a curious medium in which to express the madness and torment of Becket's struggle with his fate. What the audience sees is not so much the performance of a play, as the enactment of a ritual. The characters speeches are set in poetry: there is the barest outline of a plot. It is up to the director and the actors themselves to endow this ritual with all the intensity and the passion of the themes it seeks to express. Director David Wheeler and the Theatre Company...
...acting itself was uniformly good. William Young, as Thomas Becket, turned in a performance that was for the most part sensitive to the ambiguities and contradictions of his character's personality. We see clearly Becket's greatness; at the same time we are permitted a glimpse into his madness. The four women of Canterbury play their roles with a vitality that does much to enhance the importance of their function within the play; unfortunately, however, the energy with which they weep and gnash their teeth sometimes has a way of obscuring the beauty of their lines...
...realism. But the triumph of Meister Francke's mature style is seen in the St. Thomas of Canterbury altar piece, painted after 1424 for a group of Hamburg merchants trading with England. The nine panels of this darkly glowing work depict episodes in the life of Thomas à Becket, together with scenes from the Passion of Christ and the life of the Virgin, achieving a peak of dramatic intensity hitherto unrealized in North German painting. In The Martyrdom of St. Thomas, the kneeling archbishop half turns toward his attackers. Blood streams down his forehead and splashes onto his white...
SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9 p.m. to midnight). Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole in Becket...