Word: larking
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...sense Joan goes through the entire play with "her eyes skyward." This is a far different approach from the one which Jean Anouilh and Lillian Hellman took in The Lark--a comparison of the two plays seems both inevitable and intriguing--and dramatically it is a much more difficult approach. Shaw has purposely deprived himself of the spontaneous, natural, earthy Joan who made such an attractive heroine for Anouilh. Instead he has made her a saint--and everyone knows that there is nothing duller than a saint's life...
Henry V, the main Shakespeare work on this year's program, afforded an opportunity to experiment. Canadian-born Actor Christopher Plummer, who had a Broadway triumph as the Earl of Warwick in The Lark (TIME, Nov. 28, 1955), was cast in the title role. Opposite him, as the French King Charles VI, Langham put Gratien Gélinas, the ranking clown of French-Canadian musical revues. Members of Montreal's theatrical corps, schooled in the French acting tradition, were brought to Stratford to people the French scenes. The play was a solid hit, with Shakespeare's French...
...level of acting is consistently high. Michael Higgins is magnificent in the demanding role of Eddie. He controls to perfection a versatile voice that, without forcing, projects clearly almost any distance. Having seen him before in Desire Under the Elms, The Lark, and Abe Lincoln in Illinois, I do not hesitate to rate him as one of the very top young actors of our day. I don't believe he could give a poor performance. He impresses both my eye and ear as being like what I suspect Raymond Massey was at the height of his prime...
...subsequent wars. Audiences might argue whether Samuel Beckett's puzzling, plotless Waiting for Godot was profound art or a mere philosophic quiz show; less arguable was the neatness of its writing, the desolation of its mood. In Lillian Hellman's sharp adaptation, Jean Anouilh's The Lark proved a lively stage piece; under Tyrone Guthrie's vivid direction, Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, if still no play, was rich in theater, spectacle, rhetoric...
...codicils to his own tattered, 30-year-old marriage contract. It is at the bottom of the boss's sunken garden that Tom meets Louise, an exotic fragment of brunette poetry. Over cocktails, it turns out that her beefy husband is Tom's dentist. Tom and Louise lark off for a weekend together and get found out. In one of the more bloodcurdling scenes in recent fiction, the cuckolded dentist, drill in hand, hovers over Tom ready to extract a moment of truth...