Word: burgesses
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...ANTHONY BURGESS' latest novel is the modern literary equivalent of a grotesque medieval woodcut by Hans Holbein the Younger. In Holbein's macabre artistic world, people blithely conduct their lives as usual, while unseen the Grim Reaper, lurking in the shadows, waits to carry them off. Death is also the main character in Burgess' markedly disappointing effort: never mind that he presents Ronald Beard, an aging British screen writer, as his hero; it becomes quickly apparent Burgess' is more concerned with Death than with Beard...
...Dublin dialect, while invariably musical, is sometimes irritatingly impenetrable. In a troupe that plays well, but not always together, Cyril Cusack stands out as a sly, roguish charmer. Siobhan McKenna, a woman seemingly larger of spirit than any role she fills, makes Bessie Burgess a matron of blood, steel and tears. T.E. Kalem
...their wives went mad trying to keep them safe at home. The only heroes in The Plough and Stars are those who neither fight nor spout rhetoric: Fluther Good, the working man whose honest dignity defies the British to do their worst, though he is terrified of gunshot; Bessie Burgess, who nurses Nora through losing a baby and husband and is killed trying to get Nora away from a dangerous window; and Mrs. Gogan, who at the end of the play performs the last rituals of civilization, keeping afloat the ceremonies of innocence, or at least of decency...
Though two of the Abbey's finest actors, Cyril Cusack and Siobhan McKenna, returned for this production, the acting somehow seems stagey and lackluster. Surface characterization is emphasized at the expense of deeper emotional involvement. Siobhan McKenna plays Bessie Burgess with grandeur but drops the ends of her lines; Scorcha Cusack staggers a bit too much as Nora. Bill Foley, as Peter Flynn, says his lines as though reading them for the first time. Maire O'Neil, as the prostitute Rosie, makes immediate some of O'Casey's profoundest lines, his true revolutionary credo of communism--but her characterization slips...
...PLAY lacks the direction tht would have made it progress steadily up to the grand tragedy of the last act. Since her character is not developed from the beginning, Bessie Burgess' heroism seems to come from nowhere. Her death fails to be convincingly tragic. And in Nora's madness there are heard none of the Ophelian overtones that O'Casey's lines can convey: what appears onstage is little more than hysteria...