Word: colenso
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Into the office of the London tuberculosis specialist Sir Colenso Ridgeon comes a beautiful woman (Katharine Cornell). She wants the doctor to cure her husband, a brilliant painter and incorrigible amoralist-a liar, cadger and thief in practical matters. Through some of the clankingest plot mechanics in history, Sir Colenso is forced to choose between saving the life of this caddish genius and that of a poor, upright little Government doctor. The issue is complicated by Sir Colenso's desire for the painter's wife. Finally he decides to abandon the painter-only to be spurned...
Producer Cornell has gathered a cast of veterans who act like it-Raymond Massey (Sir Colenso), Bramwell Fletcher (the painter), Clarence Derwent, Whitford Kane, Ralph Forbes, Colin Keith-Johnston. Cecil Humphreys is sidesplitting as the pompous Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington, who explains that he finds it necessary to live in the style to which his rich patients are accustomed...
Designer Donald Oenslager's setting of Sir Colenso's dinner party on the terrace of the Star and Garter is in the grand romantic manner. But the play's best view is Katharine Cornell herself, once described by Shaw as "a gorgeous dark lady from the cradle of the human race -wherever that was-Ceylon, Sumatra, Hilo, or the southernmost corner of the Garden of Eden!" Here she wears costumes (by the English house of Motley) inspired by the paintings of the late Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931), the "Master of Swish" whose society portraits had an even...