Word: farquhar
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Curiously, though, the five foremost practitioners of the genre were far from prolific. Etherege wrote only three plays; Wycherley, four; Vanbrugh (also renowned as an architect), three and a half; Congreve (the most accomplished of the group), five; and Farquhar, seven and a half. This corpus laid the foundation and set the standard for the two supreme masterpeices of the genre: Sheridan's The School for Scandal, a century later; and Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, two centuries later...
...theater, the luck of the English has been the Irish. From Sheridan and Farquhar through Synge, Shaw and O'Casey, Irish-born dramatists have adorned English speech with tears, wit and poetic music. All the great Irish writers possess the gift for lightening or deepening the color of language. They bring to it both a larky playfulness and a brooding melancholy. They are the unofficial patron saints of English, and it is these saints of the word whom the distinguished Irish actress Siobhan McKenna is honoring in a superior one-woman show called Here Are Ladies. Selections...
...worry about last week. First, she won an Oscar for her witty and sympathetic portrayal of the title character in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Then, the night after the award, Maggie's opening performance in London's National Theater production of Farquhar's The Beaux' Stratagem (TIME, Feb. 2) won glowing reviews and further enhanced her reputation in England, where at 35 she is already the leading actress of her generation. All of which only left her rather numb and glum amid the flowers in her dressing room at the Old Vic. "Everybody seems...
...genre is organic, and aging like a man, becomes tired, jaded and brittle. Substance succumbs to style, and the play and the playwright simply go through the motions of existence for lack of having any specific convictions about the right place to go. Such was the condition of George Farquhar, the last Restoration playwright, who died in 1707 at the unseemly...
...that did not quite know what it was. He was, in effect, writing for dead playgoers, many of whom still occupied the theater seats, a situation vividly applicable to the contemporary theater. Restoration comedy thrived on high wit, low morals and ice-cold hearts. But by Farquhar's day, the twin corrupters of that comedy lurked in the wings-virtue, which would bar both wit and lechery from the stage, and romance, which would open the sluices of sentimentality. Traces of this mar Farquhar's last play, The Beaux' Stratagem...