Word: firstborns
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...people gathered, family by family, in huts and houses, slum flats and luxury apartments, to celebrate their Lord's great act of deliverance-the Passover. It was the 3,271st anniversary, according to Jewish reckoning, of that dark night when the Lord moved through Egypt, striking down the firstborn, "from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the first-born of the captive that was in the dungeon . . . and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead." But each house of the children of Israel...
...Firstborn (by Christopher Fry), begun in 1938, was first staged in 1948 at the Edinburgh Festival. A stiffly earnest play, it is laid in Egypt and centered in Moses. With the Pharaoh persecuting the Jews, a Moses already estranged from the palace of his upbringing turns wholly to the people of his birth. In the conflict, Pharaoh's young son Rameses sympathizes with the oppressed: but when the firstborn in every Egyptian family is struck down, the humane royal firstborn perishes with the rest...
...despite graphic moments, The Firstborn is a lifeless failure, it is less that Fry had not yet acquired a rhetoric than that he had misapplied it. His literary conceits, his verbal arabesques suffocate anything truly alive. Half don, half dandy, Fry was to find himself in mannerism rather than substance, in the mocking wink rather than the observing eye. Despite Katharine Cornell's regal efforts as Pharaoh's sister, or trumpet-voiced Anthony Quayle's as Moses, the Egypt of The Firstborn is mummified. Only Boris Aronson's sets evoke something once living and still large...
...hard to tell what Christopher Fry's The Firstborn is about. The overall impression is of far-of solid stone-hewn figures in a somehow intensely pregnant atmosphere, speaking heavily, as from a tomb...
...Firstborn is an interesting production, but not the theatrical event that many hoped it would...