Word: liar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Dear Liar is a "comedy of letters" that Actor-Director Jerome Kilty wove out of the 40-year correspondence between Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Bernard Shaw. What results is no play, nor is it meant to be. Katharine Cornell and Brian Aherne are intentionally dramatic instruments rather than impersonators. In form, the whole thing, which reached Broadway after a road tour of 66 cities, most resembles a set of verbal duets. Adapter Kilty, with an ingenious try, displays neat workmanship, and the two stars have gone gallantly at their rather anomalous roles. But pleasant and provocative as it is, Dear...
...what Dear Liar suffers from is less Shaw as lover than Shaw as letter writer, a role in which he falls far short of the dramatist. Things perk up when the stars can get their teeth into something theatrical rather than into each other, as when they go over a scene from Pygmalion. But the stars are not quite wedded to their parts. Unfailingly gracious, Actress Cornell seems too gentle and Actor Aherne seems somehow too jaunty...
...been a thundering liar. Frank Harris would have been a great autobiographer. He shared with the major self-portrait artists-Cellini, Pepys, Boswell and Rousseau-the paradoxical but necessary combination of a surging pride and a vestigial sense of shame. But he had the crippling disqualification that he told the truth, as Max Beerbohm once remarked, only "when his invention flagged...
...same, Henry IV is almost unthinkable without Falstaff. Whether in the bottle scenes where he swaggers like a general, or in the battle scenes where he quivers like a jelly, this thieving, braggart liar, this gorging, guzzling "huge bombard of sack" who lives on his wits and gets by on his charm so bestrides the play that the great danger is he will completely distort it; he so domineers over it on occasion as to send royalty and even history packing...
...Billy Liar, by Keith Waterhouse. A young mortician's clerk in Yorkshire dreams of London but succeeds, in this slightly muddled comic novel, only in losing his head while all about him are keeping theirs...