Word: duking
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...prime mover in the play is the Duke, who after many years of lax rule turns over the reins to his deputy Angelo. But those who equate the Duke with the Christian God are surely in error--unless God is scheming, deceitful, mendacious, irresponsible, fallible, and not without a streak of cruelty. The role is a flawed attempt at the kind of semi-divine authority-figure that Shakespeare would eventually limn so wonderfully as Prospero in The Tempest...
...insight, the dramaturgy is faulty. The first half of the play shows the stuff of tragedy, although the work contains not a single character of real stature. When Shakespeare boxes himself into a corner half way through, his personages cease to be rounded--if inconsistent--characters; he takes the Duke-Nixon outside the play and turns him into a sort of divine puppeteer who pulls his strings whimsically, and he winds up with an opera buffa finale that is in a different world altogether...
...rather surprised at his own slide into treachery. In view of the play's "happy" ending. Kerr quite rightly makes Angelo not an arch-villain but a probably redeemable sinner. His soliloquies are exemplary. Telling too are his deliberate movements, his slow gait, his hesitation to accept the Duke's proffered symbol of authority, the kneading of his fingers, the wiping of his sweaty palms with a white handkerchief, and, especially, his intense eyes capable of burning like a pair of laser beams...
...most strict Catholic orders would share the Church's position against consummation before the marriage ceremony. And how does one square her extreme statement that "More than our brother is our chastity" with her decision, at play's end, to forsake the convent and wed the Duke? Still, her two lengthy interviews with Angelo, in the first half of the play, are, both intellectually and dramatically, the two great scenes in the work (partly adumbrated by Portia in The Merchant of Venice). Christina Pickles, in her debut with the AST, could use a wider vocal range: but she does manage...
...partnership as booksellers and art dealers in London. Lloyd astutely realized that, with postwar taxation and the wartime ruin of landed estates, the great English collectors of the prewar years would now become sellers. He gained access to them and their collections through David Somerset, heir presumptive to the Duke of Beaufort. Over the past two decades, Somerset-who hobnobs with such figures as David Rockefeller and Aristotle Onassis-has been invaluable to Lloyd, steering collections and clients toward him and, best of all, introducing him to the Italian auto magnate Giovanni Agnelli, an impassioned collector. The chain of contacts...