Word: helena
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When directors undertake to dust off Shakespeare plots, the noise of the vacuum cleaner all too often drowns out the play, but Director Tyrone Guthrie, a veteran of the Old Vic, never allows that to happen. The story of All's Well, lifted from Boccaccio, is about Helena, a poor physician's daughter married by royal command to a snobbish young count. The groom runs off to the wars before the wedding day has even reached the cocktail hour. The rest of the play tells how Helena plots her way into her husband's bedchamber and eventually...
...transformation is aided by brilliant modern costumes, both Voguish and roguish, designed by Tanya Moiseiwitsch; Shakespeare in tails seems no more anachronistic than Shaw in a toga, and at times quite as cynical. The play's "Florentine Widow" becomes a wonderful old madam catering to the occupation forces; Helena's choosing a husband is turned into a charming kind of debutante cotillion; and the scene in which the braggart Parolles (superbly played by Douglas Campbell) is exposed as a miserable coward becomes a genuinely funny affair, full of the gaiety, and cruelty, peculiar to the pranks of soldiers...
...real star is the Old Vic's Irene Worth, a Nebraska girl who went to England a decade ago and came back (she was last seen with Guinness in Manhattan in T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party) sounding more English than Edith Sitwell. She plays Helena as if she meant it with all her heart; her love for a fool is convincing, her distress in a farcical predicament truly moving, and her every word audible, even above the tooting of passing trains...
...spirit of adventure placed them-on an entire continent, on great islands and pinprick islets, in obscure deserts, tropical jungles, foam-flecked northern fishing villages, places with exotic names like Zanzibar, edible-sounding names like the Cameroons or Tortola, improbable names like Gozo or Piddlehinton, famous ones like St. Helena or Piccadilly. No man among them can fluently speak the tongues of all-Urdu and Sanskrit, Dutch and French, Hottentot, Greek, Turkish, Cockney, Twi, Gaelic...
...longhand on scraps of brown paper). The lack of a master's and a doctorate, however, was never a handicap. Students flocked to his classes, crowded into his office in the afternoon, swarmed into his cluttered living room at night. There, with his wife ("Grandma") and daughter (Helena Ayesha Theodora), Monkey Wrench would entertain for hours. "Treat 'em like grownups," he would say of his students. "But remember, they're nothing but kids. You've got to be as young as they...