Word: butley
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...BUTLEY by Simon Gray. Alan Bates as a hilariously self-destructive English professor drinking the hemlock of middle-aged failure...
...Broadway's 34 theaters were dark last week. Of the 18 in business, only a handful-including those housing the musicals Pippin and Two Gentlemen of Verona and the plays Butley and That Championship Season -were taking in enough at the box office to make a profit for the shows and for themselves. (Broadway theaters do not charge rent from producers, but take 25% of the box office gross.) Just to rub things in, some 23 national touring companies of past seasons' hits like Jesus Christ Superstar and No, No, Nanette are outdrawing Broadway productions for the first...
...Anglo-American stage since Bill Maitland in John Osborne's Inadmissible Evidence. The irony is that such anti-heroes require heroic performances from the actors who play them. Nicol Williamson erupted volcanically in Inadmissible, and Alan Bates (TIME, Nov. 6) is a flood tide of brilliance in Butley. The two plays and the two characters have a good deal in common. One feels that if Maitland and Butley could harness their energy and alter the direction of their venomous wit, they could put their lives straight in no time...
...master of long, eloquent, spellbinding monologues, while Britain's Simon Gray, author of last season's transvestite farce, Wise Child, is more the fencing master of brief, bitchy repartee. All of the fun is put-down humor, incessant gamesmanship, at which the British are virtually unbeatable. Butley's eviscerating wit is cool, cruel and precise, which does not prevent it from being unutterably funny...
...dissimilarity between Maitland and Butley is that Maitland is so introspectively self-concerned that he reveals his total being, while Butley is relentlessly analytical of other people and utterly blind to himself. This inhibits the playgoer's compassion. Maitland's experiences are a distillation of pain; Butley's, merely a concentrated display of panic. Nonetheless, there is considerable pathos in Butley, for his manic verbal foolery is the despair of a man who cannot afford the respite of silence...