Word: celia
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...talky self-analysis of considerable pathos. This makes for a jarring discrepancy of mood without any compensating illumination of meaning. Act I is fun and naughty games. In it, Philip ends up in bed with a Venus's-fly-trap of a girl. His fiancée Celia (Jane Asher) pairs up with a cynical aphorist out of early Aldous Huxley. This hedonist with a literate leer acquires luxuriant narcissistic finesse from the performance of Victor Spinetti...
...Philip seems to personify a biblical adage in reverse. He cannot love his neighbor (or his fiancée) like himself because he does not love himself. Celia leaves him, which makes good sense but rather flat drama. What redeems the evening is McCowen's acting. He has a feel for the role that is as sensitive as a safecracker's fingertips. At one moment he is the bemused absent-minded professor, at another the twinkling champion of verbal pingpong, and at still another, an anguished human with a parched heart...
...Celia, aaah, don't. No, help. Celia, they will, they'll get me, no kidding, they're here... aaah. Celia, you must, no, don't go, they...
PRUDENTIAL'S ON STAGE (NBC. 10-11 p.m.). Problems of heart transplants are dramatized in "The Choice," an original play with Melvyn Douglas, George Grizzard, Celia Johnson and Frank Langella...
...superb New York production of 1950, Alec Guinness brought an aura of mystery and suave authority to the part of Harcourt-Reilly, and Irene Worth as Celia evoked a taut sense of spiritual crisis. Without their skills, the confessional-psychiatric dialogue, which sends Celia off to her eventual anthill, sounds surprisingly specious and unconvincing. Suddenly more awkward than intriguing are Eliot's pomposities, like the stilted toast that the three Guardians intone to the future of their charges. And it no longer seems much fun to speculate on the writer's half-veiled allusions (do a pair...