Word: coriolanus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Tommy, who is a Harvard senior, is a member of the football team and also an actor, having played a major role in 3 Sisters and Coriolanus in last year's Loeb production. But he is a jock and not an actor when he is not working...
...parts, Ronald Hunter as Hector and Louis Plante as Ajax were excellent, attempting successfully to take characters whom audiences associate with moral and physical arche-types and make them something quite different. Arthur Friedman didn't look a day older than he did playing Aufidius in a recent Loeb Coriolanus and consequently didn't convince me he was senile old Nestor for a minute...
...poor sound on the film track and Michael Tschudin's silly music which underscores dialogue with all the precision of a dead organist slumped over his keyboard. But Babe's crowded battles, rendered more evocative than specific by bouncing light off shiny armour are, when best executed by Coriolanus's decidedly unconfident extras, unnervingly realistic and indicative of Babe's proclivity toward cinematic stage effect...
...mixed bag and the sum total of Babe's ideas can only bring us to Coriolanus. Babe opts-out of the traditional director's game of characterizing Coriolanus by motivating his inability to humble himself before the plebeians. Corresponding to his entire approach, Babe emphasizes diverse characteristics of the man as situations arise. Strongest seems a perverse sense of humor: Coriolanus smiles and waves goodbye when he leaves Rome, as if he were leaving for summer camp. Tom Jones is neither larger-than-life, like Olivier (Stratford, 1960), or rich and petulant, like Ian Richardson (Stratford, 1967), and relies heavily...
Equally fine is Frances Gitter as his mother Volumnia, giving the most articulate and intelligent performance in a generally excellent cast. Frank Hartenstein's lighting added more to characterization than one dares hope for at the Loeb: a scene between Coriolanus and six others on a balcony proved remarkable in that only Coriolanus's shadow was projected onto the stage floor fifteen feet below, serving to isolate him completely from the other more reasonable characters...