Word: dramatists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Congreve was the master dramatist of the genre and of its convoluted mechanics. Plots, subplots, stratagems, backfiring intrigues and unmaskings make up The Way of The World. In simplest terms, the play hangs on a purse string. The superannuated but insatiably lustful Lady Wishfort (Jessica Tandy) controls a fortune and has an itch for the philanderer Mirabel (Jeremy Brett). He, in turn, has fallen in love with her niece Millamant (Maggie Smith) and schemes to blackmail Lady Wishfort in order to secure her consent to his marriage to Millamant. That is just about what happens...
Hellman might have alleviated their guilt. She is a master dramatist; if it had been her intention, she would have structured a book of building tension and inner agony, climaxing in her triumph, in swells of applause and a vindicated life...
...writing for the London Sunday Times, James Agate commented that Noel Coward, "whether as dramatist or composer, has worked invariably for the passing moment, for the present laughter rather than the applause of posterity...Whatever he does, the effect is theatrical, greasepainted." These lines serve as an appropriate epigraph for Coward's life and work, and also for Kirkland House Drama Society's finely acted and tightly directed production of Coward's comedy Present Laughter...
Present Laughteris designed simply to entertain. Coward spoofs the "theater of ideas" advocated by Ibsen and Chekov in the character of Roland Maule, a young cuckoo-headed would-be playwright. Maule, a caricature of the "serious" dramatist, spouts streams of cliched arguments about "commercial theater," "intellectual significance,"and of course "posterity." Ironically Maule adores and admires Garry, who personified frivolous commercial theater...
...skills as a serious dramatist, Harold Pinter, 45, seems to have patterned his private life after a daytime soap opera. Last summer the British author of The Homecoming separated from his wife of 19 years, Actress Vivien Merchant, 46, and took up housekeeping with Lady Antonia Fraser, 43, a whirling dervish of London society, a biographer (Mary Queen of Scots) and mother of six. Tory M.P. Hugh Fraser kept discreetly quiet about his wife's affair, but Merchant sued Pinter for divorce, and the new lovemates quickly assumed a low public profile. Lately, however, those profiles have ventured back...