Word: bolte
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Weary Magnificence. Scofield, 39, is Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, a superb testimonial to the seldom-realized potential of the individual conscience. With a kind of weary magnificence, Scofield sinks himself in the part, studiously underplays it, and somehow displays the inner mind of a man destined for sainthood. Not content just to applaud, much of the audience stands and noisily shouts its appreciation for his movingly perfect performance. Appearing in the U.S. for the first time, Scofield was preceded by a reputation hard to live up to. From Kenneth Tynan...
...Seasons, by Robert Bolt, is a prismatic play that throws its varicolored light on the theme of public duty v. private conscience. As Sir Thomas More, British Actor Paul Scofield gives a performance that is an incarnation...
...this clash between public duty and private conscience, Playwright Bolt has made a drama that relies on precision of language rather than eloquence, the prism of thought rather than the blade of action. Strangely and wondrously, for a Broadway stage, it is the mind that dances in Seasons; faith is the inner core, but intelligence is the outward proof of the hero's virtue. That a play so chaste in its lucidity should ultimately fill a playgoer's eyes with tears is partly a debt British Playwright Bolt owes to British Actor Paul Scofield...
...Seasons is not a tragedy but a kind of militant retreat, with heavy losses, to a prepared position, the rock of More's religious faith. From the first, Bolt's hero shows that he is wise in the ways of the world, but not bound to the world's fawning favors. He urges a restless underling to become a fine teacher. "And if I was, who would know it?" asks the ambitious young man. Answers More quietly: "You, your pupils, your friends, God. Not a bad public, that..." In the end, More himself heartbreakingly loses not only...
...Bolt's meaning is clear: one must resist the compromise that corrupts, the conformity with society that becomes deformity of the soul. But modern man's plight is more complex than Bolt's parable suggests: it is to locate the ground of faith on which to stand. Sir Thomas More was an exalting figure of probity, but he possessed the inner certainty that his final public was, indeed...