Word: corum
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...fabric of history, which T. S. Eliot stretched upon a strangely spiritual frame, is restored to a more human and traditional shape by Richard Corum's brilliant direction of Murder in the Cathedral. Corum's work gains its vigor by rejecting Eliot's theological interpretation of Becket's martyrdom. From a poetically beautiful but theatrically impossible play, he has created an intellectually indecisive drama of enormous power...
...remove all doubt of Becket's motives, the author placed the demands of the world in the mouths of four tempters, whose role was to persuade, not to portray men. The director must force these speakers to understate, and must impose evenness and unity upon them. Instead, Corum has allowed the tempters to act as individuals who have personalities of their own instead of intellectual pawns who play Eliot's spiritual game. Only Richard Silberg remains impersonally persuasive; Philip Alston Stone, Stephen Kennedy, and Andreas Teuber have created personalities for themselves (in Teuber's case, and Eliot's lines...
Becket's acceptance of martyrdom is the purest spiritual achievement in Eliot's play. He transcends even the temptation of becoming a martyr so that he may be worshipped. Corum has destroyed Eliot's clear position. He has decided to return the four tempters to stage as the knights who murder the archbishop, and the tempter who offered Becket immortality through martyrdom asks, after the death, whether Becket did not will himself to be killed. For Eliot this was a rhetorical question, answered in the cool detachment of Becket's final lines, and by the contrast between Becket...
...Eliot himself would have had difficulty reading much of his play in a way that would preserve the spiritual content. Corum has succeeded, by his reinterpretation, in producing a work whose ascetic tenor otherwise presents insurmountable problems...
...most celebrated undergraduate J-school in the nation - is marking its 50th anniversary of helping good smart kids. Missouri has turned out some 6,500 graduates, including U.P.I. Vice President and Washington Manager Lyle Wilson, Publisher Jack Flynn of the New York Daily News, and the late sportswriter Bill Corum of the Hearst papers...