Word: gielgud
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...rule it. Some actors hold an audience; a few possess it. Some actors light up a scene; a few ignite the play. These combustible few blaze with the x factors of acting-intensity, intelligence, and authority. Theirs is a royalty apart from role, and when an Olivier, Gielgud, Nicol Williamson or Irene Papas treads the stage, their fellow actors are as rapt as the audience. Though the marquees of Broadway do not bear his name, Moses Gunn is of this regal breed...
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...
...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 it: as the milquetoast of human kindness. Like the devil, the devil's advocate has all the best lines, even if many of them are overwrought and overwrit. It is Magee...
...dramatic vise. His eyes sear the viewer. He is not speaking to the air; he is speaking to you. As far as Williamson is concerned, elocution be damned. Poetry be damned. Meaning is all. Never has Hamlet been rendered with more clarity or more biting timeliness, and that includes Gielgud, Olivier and Burton. Shakespeare held the mirror up to nature. Williamson holds a mirror up to the soul...
...John Gielgud, Lady Diana Cooper and Richard Attenborough dined at 8:30 or thereabouts, and Merle Oberon flew in from Acapulco. The Queen Mother Elizabeth had him round to lunch. Book shops positively blossomed with Sheridan Morley's new Coward biography, A Talent to Amuse. At London's Phoenix Theater, Princess Margaret and Tony joined everyone in singing "Happy Birthday." After which Richard Briers and Susannah York did the balcony scene from Private Lives (currently playing in Manhattan, amid great nostalgia and critical acclaim). Other Coward sketches and songs followed until, at 4 in the morning, the Chinese...