Word: duelist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Adventure of the Second Stain for the Prime Minister. We had also known curious cases. There was, for example, the puzzle of the politician, the lighthouse and the trained cormorant, referred to in The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger; and the singularity of Isadora Persano, the journalist and duelist who was found stark mad with a matchbox in front of him that contained a remarkable worm, said to be unknown to science (The Problem of Thor Bridge). But never had there been a case as complex and fraught with such grave worldly consequences as The Case of the Strange Erasures...
Thanks to Anouilh's vividly ironic vision, much of the evening is howlingly funny. Wallach has always possessed perfect comic pitch and he displays it again here. However, he lacks that certain panache which makes St. Pé a duelist with destiny rather than a Good Soldier Schweik taking fate's pratfalls. Jackson is an awesome virago who delivers her lines like bayonet thrusts...
...Mona Lisa a great painting, Les Sylphides a great ballet, or Clair de Lune a great piece of music? Not really, but they are all sentimental favorites. So it is with Cyrano de Bergerac. Both the play and its hero are more than a trifle silly. Yet this poet-duelist ham who boasts of besting 100 men in a single encounter has proved endearing...
Raul is a good subject, a tangle of immaturities held together by intelligence. He hides as much of the jumble as he can behind a pose that is half self-satire. The "Black Prince," as he calls himself in mockery, is a mannered, deadly literary duelist who slices fellow students and blundering adults into home fries with razor-edged misquotations. The Black Prince is a devilish smoker of cigarettes and a virgin, who is torn between self-disgust at this fault and contempt for the mawkishness of teen-age passion...