Word: gambone
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...Uncle Vanya (translated by Michael Frayn, directed by Michael Blakemore) that does justice to both Chekhov's hearty humor and his compassionate sadness at the waste of frustrated lives. It perceives the play's dominant tone not as lethargy but as furious, tragically misdirected energy. As Vanya, Michael Gambon demonstrates anew why he has come to be regarded as perhaps Britain's foremost stage actor. Alternately raging and lapsing into bathos, bubbling with kindness as he worsens the lives of those he most means to help, he embodies the tragedy of a common man. Just as powerful are Imelda Staunton...
Jerry (Michael Gambon) is a literary agent married to Judith, whom we never see. Robert (Daniel Massey) is a publisher and Jerry's oldest friend. Jerry was Robert's best man when he got married to Emma (Penelope Wilton). In the drunken pass that ignites the affair in Scene 9, Jerry says to Emma, "I should have had you, in your white, before the wedding." Lust will find a way. Jerry rents a place in the country, and the pair make love in the afternoons. But joy is applied like a cosmetic, and pain is masked...
Betrayal is blessed in its stars. Massey's Robert speaks with a honed intelligence. The presence of Wilton's Emma would warm any flat, and as for Gambon's Jerry, he is a fond slave of love, though perhaps too passive to be a literary agent. Few playgoers can have left The Caretaker and The Homecoming without being viscerally shaken up. Quite a few may leave Betrayal, with its anesthetized passions, feeling vaguely shaken down...
...hero of this laceratingly literate play suffers from cardiac arrest, not physically but emotionally. Simon (Michael Gambon), an affluent publisher, is an impervious monster of urbane civility. If his heart goes out to anything, it is to the punctilious use of English. On the particular day that the drama transpires, he wishes to listen to his new recording of Parsifal in monastic solitude...
...Radio Times. A young woman (Jacqueline Pearce) with a manuscript in tow strips to the waist, brazenly daring Simon to ravish and, of course, publish her. Finally, his parched-for-love wife announces that she is pregnant, possibly by a man whom Simon despises. The subtlest alteration in Michael Gambon's marvelously controlled performance suggests that Parsifal will never sound the same again. No moat of detachment can guard the vulnerable castle of the heart...