Word: leantio
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...avoid this effect, and thus make the fall of the three all the more dramatic, Senelick is forced to mute the first act. Unfortunately Leantio, the merchant's clerk who loses his high-born bride on account of his stupid, Ben Franklin punctilliousness, has some of his best and most revealing lines in the opening moments: losing them destroys some of the irony so carefully worked into succeeding scenes. But as Kenny McBain went at the role rather gingerly throughout all of last night's performance, Leantio may be better served when he settles into the part...
Once the necessity of the youth's decline becomes known, Senelick asserts a masterly control. He counter-points the rapes and deceits which finally consume everyone on stage, (except perhaps the bourgeois Leantio, whose "breeding" makes life at court intolerable) with a rich display of period objects and customs. The two themes, the perversion of every code of conduct and the persistent and self-serving reverence for the code itself come together in the final scene: the principals all do one another in while the Duke of Florence, portrayed with a peculiar accent by Jonathan Raymond, complains that none...
There remains far too short a space to praise the company, in the style they deserve. Sheila Hart is as always matchless; it is to be regretted that as the mother of Leantio part of her character dies a-borning in the first act and the very strength of her acting, coming as it does when the play is weakest, tends to reaffirm that fact...
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