Word: belch
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Returning Natives. While the gales of power politics howl over its head, Berlin goes about its business. By day, the streets are crowded with shoppers; the city's score of electrotechnical plants belch smoke against the Prussian-blue sky; workmen scramble over scaffolding of a $900,000 British-American cigarette factory, the newest plant in the city. With a labor force of nearly a million and only 36,000 unemployed (matching the alltime low of last September), West Berlin can boast that it is Germany's biggest industrial city...
Berghof's staging of the outdoor barbecue and drinking party participated in by Sir Toby Belch and his cronies is a brilliant elaboration. It is also leisurely: the carousers join in singing, one after another, a wonderful series of catches and glees--and not just snatches, but entire pieces. These, and the rest of the extensive musical score for the show, were composed in a sure-handed, neo-Elizabethan style by Andre Singer (his instrumentation is comprised of flute, trumpet, harp, and a sizable battery of percussion...
George Mathews is pretty funny as Sir Toby Belch. But there is much more in the role than he has extracted from it; he doesn't even live up to his own last name. Michael Wager acts a suitably foolish Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and looks ridiculous in his red and azure clothes and yellow gloves. John Karlen makes the most of the servant Fabian, the one badly written role in the play...
...completely automated hog, whose comfort is so catered to that he never moves a muscle except to belch, the reason why lean meat has all but vanished from bacon...
...living, and his fine performance helps to keep the plaintive note running through the comic scenes (though it points up the fact that William S. Gilbert's Jack Point, constructed on the same basis, is a more interesting character than Feste). Richard Wordsworth (Malvolio), Joss Ackland (Sir Toby Belch), and the other comics play conventionally, with the down-the-line competence that distinguishes the Old Vic from American Shakespearean companies...