Word: hackwork
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...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...
...sets to work-it is 1939-with a younger Depression-age writer who has admired Halliday's books but quarreled with his values. But beyond having no stomach for short-order hackwork, Halliday has no resources. Daystpass in California and New York as he fishes for ideas in water that has gone over the dam, as he tosses crumpled typewriter paper after crumpled memories, as he struggles against a deadline that is indeed an obituary...
...quiz show proves to be pregnant by an unknown soldier: to save the show's honor, the girl must be married at once. At once the motor whirs, in dash the characters, and out bounce the gags, off falls the handle. It is pure, dedicated hackwork, with no sign that the authors ever once are writing down. There are two or three good mad situations, a dozen or so funny gags. Topping a helpful cast is Sam Levene, has both a born knack and an acquired skill at low comedy. He cannot come close to saving the show...