Word: cowardly
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...Liners. Neither mistresses nor the fact that he kept a light on in his room until he was 30 is enough to keep the coward from combat. It is on the battlefield, with some astonishingly evocative camera work, that the director-writer-star sends up Russian literature and never lets it come down. It is as if one of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Hasidic schoolboys were managing Tolstoy's estate and Dostoevsky's psychoses. The Brothers Karamazov meet the Brothers Marx; the epic of War and Peace is reduced to a battle of church and shtetl; Boris...
...NOEL COWARD...
There is nothing misplaced about that confidence; Essendine, though near farcical in his heterosexuality, is nevertheless Playwright Coward's most detailed self-caricature. The people who dance attendance on him are all parodistically based on people who surrounded Coward when he was at the height of his fame in prewar London. First produced there in 1942, and now revived at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Present Laughter lacks the geometrically perfect craftsmanship of Private Lives and has too little narrative drive to be ranked among the elegant best of Coward's works...
...Essendine, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. emphasizes the childish charm of his old chum Coward. Theatrically, this is a wise decision. The slightest stress on what can only be called the sadomasochistic implications of Essendine's relationships with his clan could easily spoil the evening. It is much better to let the unbitter truthfulness of the writing steal over one later. Excepting Fairbanks and George Pentecost as a comically clumsy young playwright, the cast, which includes Jane Alexander and Ilka Chase, never quite achieves the sense of giddy weightlessness that a Coward comedy should have. Still, the players at least sense...
Divorced. By Maggie Smith, 40, willowy English Oscar winner (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) and this Broadway season's blase, acid-tongued divorcee in Noel Coward's drawing-room classic Private Lives: Actor Robert Stephens, 43; on grounds of Stephens' adultery; after eight years of marriage, two children; in London...