Word: director
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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PUZZLING. That about sums up the Loeb's production of The Children's Hour. Why, with a professional visiting director who presumably had her pick of Harvard actors, does the production leave the viewer so detached? Part of the answer undoubtedly rests with Lillian Hellman's somewhat dated play, and director Ella Gerber's unwillingness to delete certain overwritten scenes and lines. But the real and distirbing problem lies with the actors, who display about as much conviction and sinceretiy as marionettes...
...VISITING DIRECTOR Ella Gerber has stayed Hellman's more searing moments with expert clarity, and has given the production a professional rhythm. The actors, however mechanically they drone their lines, pick up on cues and set the swift pace essential for building and maintaining tension. Gerber displays a deft hand for creating effective stage pictures. When Mary extorts the gossip from her schoolmates that she will use to tar Karen and Martha, Gerber places her high above them on a ladder, smiling evilly down on the hapless girls. Again, during the scene of Mary's accusation, Gerber stands the teachers...
...residents of Brno promote Janacek's work as hard as they play down his life-a chronicle so scandalous that, after 50 years, Brno still blushes and changes the subject when anyone mentions it. A choir director, conductor and organ teacher, Janacek at age 27 married one of his students, 16-year-old Zdenka Schulz, and lived unhappily ever after. Despite two children, Janacek humiliated his wife with his spectacular philandering. In less amorous moments, he found time to compose three minor operas and The Excursions of Mr. Brouček, a light, satirical tale about a flight...
During a pitching, drunken revel aboard Pompey's ship, an infantry officer watches the rulers of the ancient world reeling around the deck and yearns that the earth were "on wheels." That is very nearly what Director Peter Brook has achieved in his whirling, boisterous version of Shakespeare's long, intractable tragedy, which opened last week in Stratford-upon-Avon. The play is not very often produced: exclusive of intermission, it runs 3% hours and with 42 scenes is as sprawling as a map of the Roman Empire...
...said of this drama. For Brook it is a daring choice, his first production with the Royal Shakespeare Company since 1970, when he made A Midsummer Night's Dream into a clever circus fantasy all his own. Antony and Cleopatra is not so easily transformed. At times the director seems less bent on interpreting the play than providing solutions to its technical problems. If there are more than 40 scenes, then he lets them flow into each other swiftly, with one group of actors finishing a sequence while another is starting a new one elsewhere on the stage. Brook...