Word: gideon
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Peter Shaffer, whose succès de spectacle was The Royal Hunt of the Sun, plays a labored game of "hound the humanist" in The Battle of Shrivings. Sir Gideon Petrie (John Gielgud) is an aged, Bertrand Russell-like champion of rationalism living ascetically at Shrivings, a converted medieval abbey in the Cotswold Hills. From there he guides a peace movement and blandly preaches the perfectibility of human nature to youthful acolytes and to his wife (Wendy Hiller), with whom he renounced sex, on principle...
...every sense, Sir Gideon's house seems to be in order. Actually, it is so much philosophic straw, waiting to be huffed and puffed down by Mark Askelon (Patrick Magee), a renegade poet drenched in whisky and despair. Askelon, a onetime disciple of Sir Gideon's, arrives at Shrivings to seek his lost faith through a mordant challenge to the old man's sweet reasonableness: If Askelon is given license to spend a weekend attacking Shrivings and everyone in it, will Sir Gideon's beliefs enable him to forbear, or will he be stung into betraying...
Shaw Without Shaw. The challenge is fascinating, but Sir Gideon courts disaster in accepting it. So does Playwright Shaffer. Shrivings is a Shaw play without Shaw. Where the master could have whirled the philosopher to triumph in a blaze of intellectual toughness and passion, Shaffer slips the poet the victory with too little of either. In the end, Sir Gideon is forced to throw out everything except Askelon in a battle that is not so much pitched as rigged. Gielgud lends the part a tremulous, blinking dignity, but he can only play it the way Shaffer wrote...
...Baker v. Carr, the Supreme Court paves the way for reapportionment of electoral districts across the nation, 1962. > In Gideon v. Wainwright, the Supreme Court guarantees indigents a lawyer for trials involving serious crimes...
...perverted, too [remember the homosexuality business]. I don't know how you were inverted; no one alerted you." In "I'm So Tired" the Beatles sing, "You'd say I'm putting you on, but it's no joke, it's doing me harm." And my roommate looked up "Gideon" -mentioned in "Rocky Raccoon" -in his Smith's Bible Dictionary (p. 210), and found a reference to "the reluctant Asher...