Word: comic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Stoppard laces the proceedings with racy puns, malapropisms and bureaucratese. He scales the evening's comic peak with the interpolated segment called New-Found-Land. Two Foreign Service officers enter the temporarily deserted committee room to discuss an American's application for British naturalization. The elder (Humphrey Davis) is a doddering relict from World War I who embarks on an excruciatingly elongated, hilarious account of how he once secured a cherished ?5 note from Lloyd George. The younger (Jacob Brooke) then launches on a bravura monologue about a train journey across the map of the U.S. that contains...
Director Bryan Forbes (The Wrong Box) holds such worthies as the late Edith Evans, Kenneth More and Hordern in reserve for a comic turn or two, but their ministrations are futile. Forbes recklessly appends another act to the Cinderella saga in which the commoner is forbidden to marry the Prince. She is carried by coach from the kingdom, set up in a palace where she can do what she does best - mope. The Prince knuckles under to the pressures of his station, slouches toward the altar to take another bride. Fairy Godmothers are not large on unhappy endings, however...
...theater, Williams's compendium of Dylan Thomas tends to be overly static, with little movement, either physical or dramatic. Sound and lighting instead become all-important--sound lulling us into acceptance of the comic and celebratory world of the sketches and stories, lighting marking changes of mood within this world and signalling breaks between tales...
There are further grounds for complaint, if only about Williams's intent. Describing his aims, Williams has written that he wanted to present "a warm and richly comic side" of Thomas "which is beautifully at home in the theatre." His concentration remains purposely on Thomas as storyteller; but his powerful readings of the only two poems he recites, "The Hand that Signed the Paper," and "And Death Shall Have No Dominion," made me wish he'd included more. Williams presumably feared, not without reason, that much of Thomas's poetry would prove as inaccessible to a theater audience...
...second act begins with a neat comic sketch called "Reminiscence of a Schoolmaster," who says of Thomas that "his first name was uncommon, but he was not." The show's most prolonged success, however, is Williams's rendition of the very funny "Adventures in the Skin Trade," during which his capacity for mimicry and elegant comic timing find their fullest expression...