Word: ear
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Both of Peter Shaffer's new one-act comedies, The Private Ear and The Public Eye, are failures in spite of generally good performances and the direction of Peter Wood. The Private Ear fails because it is a blatantly uninteresting and unfunny play. The Public Eye fails, though less completely, because it bungles its chance to exploit an amusing situation and a potentially fascinating trio of characters...
...Private Ear deals with three young members of London's lower middle class, and the story it tells is far from new. Ted, modern and ambitious, and Bob, anachronistic and romantic, spend an evening with Doreen, a silly little stenographer. Bob's dreamy, "sensitive" chatter only confuses Doreen, and naturally she prefers Ted. Finally, she leaves. That's all: boy meets girl, boy loses girl. Everything except boy gets girl, which, presumably is the message of the play: Naive romantics never get what they pine for. Shaffer's plot is senile and his satire is unsubtle and too familiar...
...uniformly good. Geraldine McEwan (Doreen and the accountant's wife) helps both plays during slow moments with her sense of timing and expressive face. The fault is not with the actors or director; there is simply not a great deal they can do to improve the disastrous Private Ear and the abortive Public...
Solemn Bows. Vexations' première proved it to be in many ways Satie's finest joke. After even a dozen hearings, the music became more a hex than a vex, its funereal tune permanently etched in everyone's ear. The august New York Times dispatched eight critics in two-hour relays to cover the performance and gave 101 column inches to an account the next day. One critic, who signed in as "Anon," confessed he had slept through his stint, but another, who took over the keyboard himself when one of Cage's men failed...
...lies open to a free exploration of the full possibilities of cinema as an art. The possibilities are clearly immense. No other art can so powerfully exploit the dimensions of time and space. No other art has so many ways of involving a human being. It involves his eyes, ears, mind, heart, appetites all at once. It is drama, music, poetry, novel, painting at the same time. It is the whole of art in one art, and it demands the whole of man in every man. It seizes him and spirits him away into a dark cave; it envelops...