Word: lavinia
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...despite the play's title, Androcles and the Lion are not the chief characters. In this respect, the work is like, say, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, Clymbeline, and Henry IV. Although not appearing until after the Prologue, Lavinia is Shaw's leading character and spokesman. In his Postscript, Shaw calls her "a clever and fearless freethinker." She is one of his huge gallery of extraordinary women--a group unsurpassed by any other twentieth-century dramatist. Lavinia falls into the category of those persons passionately driven by con-science and commitment--like his Saint Joan, his Major Barbara...
Herein lies the Startford production's main shortcoming. Kathleen Dabney is attractive enough in her blue toga streaked with green, but she just doesn't give evidence of meriting her position as a leader of the Christian prisoners. Her Lavinia lacks fervor and intensity; and some of her lines don't ring true...
...After Lavinia, the most important character is the Roman Captain. Wheeled in at his imposing first entrance, and decked out in armor with a raspberry cape, Josef Sommer makes him a formidable figure indeed. He is handsome, superior, intelligent, obviously used to command, and able to fall in love with another as forcefully as he is in love with himself...
...Captain and Lavinia carry on the play's most important discourse about religion, and it is too bad that the two are not more evenly matched here. It is in the course of their disputation that Shaw makes his chief point...
...other major role, that of Lavinia, is handled adequately by Bronia Stefan. On opening night, however, tragedy struck again in the two very minor parts. Jody Claflin (who, according to the program, "began her acting career when she played the Dormouse in Alice in Wonderland at the age of seven") bungled completely her brief appearance as the Nurse-Secretary. And Timothy Affleck was just as inept as a Caterer's Man. (The program tells us that he "marched at the head of the town parade in Groton, Massachusetts, in 1949.") As usual, the Theatre Company comes up with good sets...