Word: farquhar
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Bertolt Brecht, who plucked plots from Shakespeare, Moliere and Farquhar, reportedly said the best writers never borrow; they always steal. Brecht's error was limiting his dictum to the best writers. The rest are equally ready to find inspiration where someone else found it before. This is especially true of writers of musicals: attempts at original stories have become all but unheard of. With six weeks left, the '80s have yet to yield a noteworthy American musical not derived from another source, whether fiction (Big River), folklore (Into the Woods), movies ("Nine") or a painting (Sunday in the Park with...
...musical Follies, Wendy Hiller aglow in the American comedy Driving Miss Daisy and, starting next month, Rex Harrison in a revival of The Admirable Crichton. Those with a taste for undeservedly obscure classics can see two sprightly, acerbic Restoration comedies at R.S.C. headquarters in Stratford-upon-Avon, George Farquhar's The Constant Couple and William Wycherley's The Plain Dealer, plus Noel Coward's Easy Virtue, ably done in the West End. At the National, Dion Boucicault's The Shaughraun, a 19th century Irish separatist tract masquerading as a farcical melodrama, proves its author a deft orchestrator of tone...
...history, provided Marat/Sade with its power. Some 20 years later, Australian Novelist Thomas Keneally (Schindler's List) attempts the same tour de force with a fictive account of an incident in 1789, when his native land was a penal colony. There, a troupe of convicts acted in George Farquhar's comedy The Recruiting Officer, under the supervision of their frowning keepers. The opportunities for irony are omnipresent: male and female prisoners, known as lags and she-lags, are liberated into their parts, while ! guards are locked inside their roles as soldiers. Under the Southern Cross an upright commanding officer, tempted...
This savagely funny scene, as momentarily plausible onstage as it is < preposterous in the retelling, is the central event of Edward Bond's Restoration, a stunning leftist anthem masquerading as a literary curiosity. The play marries the style of, say, Congreve or Farquhar with that of Bertolt Brecht: it blends a knowing pastiche of early 18th century comedy of manners with a 20th century call for revolution. Bond, 51, author of such dramas as Saved (1965) and The War Plays (1985), has for two decades been described as one of Britain's most promising playwrights. Yet his work has remained...
...Farquhar's first thought was that ISEE-3 could be directed toward Halley, providing a drastically cheaper alternative to the more than $350 million that a new and more sophisticated mission would cost. He soon realized, however, that the radio on the diminutive probe was too weak to transmit data from 80 million miles away, the distance of Halley when it is most accessible to visiting earthships. Additional research suggested a less glamorous but more practical alternative: comet Giacobini-Zinner, which orbits the sun once every 6.5 years and could be easily visited when it was about 44 million miles...