Word: duel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...weeks, experts had said that the Kentucky Derby would be a private duel between California's stretch-running Tompion and Bally Ache, the Eastern colt with the early foot. All but shrugged off was Venetian Way, a handsome, blaze-faced colt who had won only two stakes races in a career of 14 starts. But on second sight (after the race) it turned out that the experts had forgotten some key points...
...Duel of Angels. Vivien Leigh is brilliant in Christopher Fry's adaptation of Jean Giraudoux's gloved, sheathed, cynically scented prose...
...Duel of Angels (translated and adapted by Christopher Fry from the French of Jean Giraudoux) was the last play written before his death in 1944, by the wittily ironic, aromatically pessimistic author of The Madwoman of Chaillot and Tiger at the Gates. It is a suavely chill farewell -a glass of iced champagne held in almost as cold a hand. Called Pour Lucrece in French, it offers-in the Aix-en-Provence of 1868-variations on the old tale of the violated Roman matron who, after bidding her family avenge her, committed suicide. It opens in the best Giraudoux style...
...itself-violated Lucrèce theme sounds louder chords, as the pure lady bids the rake kill himself only for him to be killed in a duel, as the righteous judge rejects the wife he thinks was raped and she takes poison, rejecting life itself, Giraudoux's artificial story remains scrupulously behind glass. But gusts of realistic rain or melodramatic sleet from time to time beat against it. Giraudoux cleverly lets his characters remark how tragedy is jostling farce, or drama is encroaching on comedy. But the play, as it plunges over rapids in which both men and women...
...this duel of attitudes, the play's blood thins as its plot thickens, and what the evening yields as a whole is not so much a sharp intellectual meaning as a plaintively cynical mood. The old generalities repeat themselves: Must sensuality grow so coarse, or purity so prudish, or life itself so punishing? But if limited in vital substance, Duel of Angels has considerable style. Christopher Fry has conveyed Giraudoux's gloved, sheathed, scented prose with great adroitness, and Roger Furse's sets and Dior's gowns enhance the provincially elegant atmosphere. If much...