Word: britannias
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...BRITANNIA has never been easily translated to the Harvard stage, and not simply because of the funny accents. A tale of modern-day British life frequently must convey a sense of national loss and social stagnation that is foreign to audiences and--much more damaging--all too often unexpressed by the actors. In the current Winthrop House production of Tom Stoppard's Enter a Free Man, this failure mars an otherwise enjoyable evening of theater...
Stoppard's protagonist George Riley is a middleaged inventor whose inventions, like a tape recorder thay plays "Rule Britannia" when the clock strikes twelve, never seem to grab the public's fancy. As a result, he lives off ten shillings a week provided by his rambunctious 18-year old daughter Linda, who works in Fancy Goods at Woolworth's. He refuses to collect unemployment compensation; that is for the masses, not for an inventor. With a new ten-bob note every "Meatless Saturday," George heads for the pub, where the locals indulge his fantasies. He is a man lost...
...DeLone's crisp direction. DeLone makes full use of the intimate confines of the Winthrop House JCR, organizing the human traffic with all the aplomb of a Back Bay traffic cop. A Stoppard play needs technical gadgetry: for true comic effect, Enter a Free Man should have a "Rule Britannia" clock, a few portraits of the Queen, BBC radio droning in the background, and "indoor rain." The Winthrop production manages well without them, but the loss of these elements cannot help but detract a little from our enjoyment...
That sounded like Rude Britannia they were humming in Chicago last week. Princess Margaret, visiting the city, paused at a Gold Coast penthouse party to chitchat with Mayor Jane Byrne. Byrne noted that she had recently been in England for the funeral of Margaret's cousin Lord Mountbatten, who had been killed...
...some problems inherent in the play. Peter Nichols (Joe Egg, The National Health) has really scrambled three plays here- a sequel to Oh! What a Lovely War, a sequel to The Boys in the Band and an indigenous British product of the past quarter-century that might be called Britannia Rues the Waves. This is a form of retroactive remorse for colonialist sins that one no longer possesses the power to commit. If Maggie Thatcher succeeds in turning England around, she may sound taps for a generation of British playwrights...