Word: butley
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...BUTLEY is cast out of a familiar mold. An obnoxious ass of an academic, he freely assaults our sympathies and yet, at the same time, manages to force his grasp upon them. He's ready to insult anyone and everyone who wanders into his cramped little office; he's always willing to play the irritating fool; he struts and scorns in a bald exhibition of inflated ego and pomposity--but, "in point of fact," he's so annoyingly good at it that he can't help but win the appreciation, if not the admiration, of the audience--his audience...
...Butley, of course, is a one-man show. That a day in the life of a lecturer at the University of London should be so successfully transformed into theater is not too surprising--like all good academic comedians. Butley is a showman, a constant performer, whose glory on the tenured stage lies in the absence of competition. Butley demands all for himself and when at the end of the play he has driven away all the other characters, including his wife and his young protege, only the audience is left to sustain him. In the course of a single...
What holds Butley together is its humor. The play is consistently funny. The laughs are disarming; this should be a sad if not pathetic story. But Butley himself could never allow that--he's too cynical, too intelligent, to allow sentiment to creep in. It is only after the final well deserved curtain call that depression begins to take hold, begins to work its way through the memories of the evening, until it seems to have consumed not just the collapse, but the entire story of Ben Butley...
...Dunster Drama Society has put on an excellent production. And in large part, of course, that means David Eisenberg's performance in the title role. His portrayal of Butley is sharp, witty, and comprehensive. In all of Butley's little games and postures, a deeper understanding is thrust upon us. He might have been simply a ridiculous fool or a petty tyrant, but Eisenberg brings to bear an added dimension and coloring that display again and again his full human character...
...Butley. At least when Alan Bates had the load, this was a tremendously funny play, literally a laugh a minute. The subject matter is unlikely--a boozy English English professor at a red brick university who in a single day manages to lose his wife, his job and his homosexual lover. It's impossible to predict whether or not the hard-edged English ability to turn pathos into comedy will be well reproduced at Dunster House, but if the Dunster House British Comedy Evening last year was any indication, they have the ability to do very well indeed. At Dunster...