Word: hackwork
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Furiously swinging an ax, the London adman whacks his desk into sawdust. "Andrew, darling," soothes the boss, "you're always threatening to resign." Andrew darling's hackwork is nothing compared with what Producer-Director Michael Winner (The Jokers) has done to this splintery British satire on the high cost of selling...
...make the sleeping pill obsolete, it does shake itself awake for two stage-splintering dance numbers featuring a pair of agile Corybantes, Paula Kelly and Jo Jo Smith. It is dispiriting to watch Arthur Hill and Barbara Cook, as novelist and wife, dutifully pouring their talents into such hackwork, but the job promises to be mercifully transient...
...swing through France and West Germany early this year, the dashing young poet was lionized at parties (including a masquerade ball during Munich's annual Carnival) by pleasure-loving bourgeois intellectuals. He even held a series of freewheeling press conferences. Heaping scorn on the party fossils whose hackwork wins the Stalin Prize each year, Evtushenko actually blamed Stalin's reign of terror on the dictator's "close associates"-of whom, though he did not say so, Nikita Khrushchev is the dean emeritus. The poet's most audacious gesture of independence was to give the editors...
...never knew you had a brother, Harvard," says Lady Cicely Waynflete to her brother-in-law, Sir Howard Hallam, in the first act of Captain Brassbound's Conversion. And Howard answers (unpardonably): "Perhaps because you never asked me." It's like that all the way through three long acts: hackwork by a great playwright. Shaw's intention, no doubt, was to present a series of outrageous sentiments in elegant language, but all that he actually achieved was a preposterous plot, a smattering of coy jokes and wheezy epigrams and a brace of cardboard characters (there's even a comic Cockney...
...that it is that for only a fraction of the evening. The rest of the time it is a variety of other routine things-routine Intourist comedy, routine U.S.S.R. satire, routine romance, routine sentiment. The authors have fitted their occasional thoughtfulness and sense of balance inside a framework of hackwork so that the play, in the end, has no more sustained topical value than theatrical impact...