Word: clara
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This old and unreliable cliché remains in vogue precisely because it is a comfort to the cynically inert conscience. Why risk a moral stance if evil, greed and calculated self-interest will invariably win out? Win they certainly do in The Visit. Clara Zachanassian (Rachel Roberts), a middle-aging, much-married multimillionairess, has come back to her impoverished home town of Gullen with a rather special proposition. She will bestow half a billion marks on the town and another half a billion to be divided equally among its citizens in return for what might be called Salome...
Seduced, impregnated and run out of town at 17, she has come back for what she calls justice: nothing less than the life of her then youthful betrayer Anton Schill (John Me Martin), now an amiable, bumbling shopkeeper and a town favorite. Responding in outrage, the townspeople treat Clara's offer as a macabre joke. However, they promptly proceed to plunge into debt on the supposition that Clara will bail them out without the sacrificial killing. Finally faced with the alternatives of penury or plenty, the citizens stage a trial in which Schill is condemned to death...
While the two leads can scarcely dispel the powerful memory of the 1958 Lunt-Fontanne production, they establish their own interpretations with unstrained validity. Rachel Roberts brings a commandingly icy meanness to Clara while hinting at a lost tenderness. In recent seasons, John McMartin has established himself as an actor of distinctive range. He has played the disenchanted author in Follies, the skeptical servant Sganarelle in Moliere's Don Juan, and the mask-divided soul Dion Anthony in O'Neill's The Great God Brown. Now, as the hero of The Visit, he is initially bland, wistfully...
Back in the village, the doors of the houses stand open, and as you walk past, Senora Clara comes out to finish hanging up her laundry...
...Jorge Julio Saavedra, author of The Taciturn Heart, whose machismo-marinated works are timeless and thus lifeless as well. A British ambassador who begins to sense the sheer outrage of U.S. imperialism when he finds that the embassy cook automatically fries his eggs Yankee style. Fortnum's wife Clara, who is (yes) a graduate of Madame Sanchez's immaculate brothel and the object of Fortnum's genuine and touching concern and chivalry. "When you get to my age," Fortnum explains, "it's not a bad thing to feel you've made at least one person...