Word: isherwood
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...role of Christopher Isherwood, Charles Cooper declaims early in the play: "I am a camera." This is very possible, for Mr. Cooper is certainly not an actor. I don't know where the producers found him--perhaps in a road company of Blossom Time--but in any case, their choice is atrocious. Alternating between leaden stolidity and an eagerness which parodies the mannerisms of Julie Harris, his performance is a long dull thud from beginning to end. In fact, with Mr. Cooper tossing off his lines with the delicacy of a shot-putter, his soliloquies offer the most painful moments...
While Mr. Cooper's limited talent is a great liability, it would take remarkable skill to make the role of Isherwood meaningful, or even to justify its prominence in the play. Adapting Isherwood's Berlin Stories for the stage, Van Druten has tried to transcribe not only the characters, but the form of the stories as well, with Isherwood the passive observer of Berlin life in the thirties. As the chronicler of the life around him, the Isherwood of the book can afford to be passive, "a camera, with shutter open." As a character in a play, however, the same...
With little pretense of plot, I Am a Camera tries to reproduce Isherwood's impressionistic picture of a decadent city. Essentially, however, the play is no more than a character sketch of the memorable Sally Bowles. Van Druten's efforts to dramatize other elements of Isherwood's portrait--particularly the plight of Jews in a Germany rotting with Naziism--are remarkably unimaginative. And less significant diversions--the American millionaire, the comic landlady--are written and played as stereotypes. Because of Julie Harris, however, I Am a Camera successfully captures the Sally of the Berlin Stories. The immature, flambouyant nymphomaniac steps...
Perhaps the trouble is editorial caution. Though its emphasis is supposed to be on new talent, New World Writing sticks to such well-established figures as Tennessee Williams, Thomas Merton and Christopher Isherwood. Moreover, the idea seems to have been to pick the most sedate examples of advance-guard writing that could be found. The result is that, while highbrow esoterica is avoided, so is highbrow boldness. Only one piece is downright bad: Tennessee Williams' tasteless closet drama about D. H. Lawrence. The rest read comfortably enough, but seldom sparkle...
...Camera. Julie (Member of the Wedding) Harris as a bad little good girl in John van Druten's pastiche of Christopher Isherwood's tales of Berlin in 1930 (TIME...