Word: lonesco
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Rhinoceros (translated from the French of Eugene lonesco by Derek Prouse) finally breached Broadway's avant-guarded walls for France's perkiest avant-gardist. The play, to be sure, has been trumpeted enough: its history included Paris and London productions with Jean-Louis Barrault and Laurence Olivier; its story dealt with people becoming rhinoceroses. If, for all that, it isn't a real Broadway event, it has its virtues as an oddity...
Often taxed with being woefully-and willfully-obscure, Playwright lonesco in Rhinoceros is by curtain time all too obvious. To the most insistent of modern-day themes, conformity, he brings the most extravagant of illustrations: that, mass-pressured enough, people will even be rhinoceroses. What starts in a provincial French town as hysteria over a rhino running loose, ends as everybody's hysteria to become one. Logicians are as eager as businessmen, leftists as logicians; at the end just one fuddled clerk (attractively played by Eli Wallach) remains human. And even he vows not to capitulate only after ruefully...
...lonesco's giving conformity a rhinoceros-hiding is a bold bit of symbolism and a funny thought for satire. But what is funny about rhinoceroses is to the same degree farfetched; lonesco's satire never proves very expressive or illuminating; men turn into rhinoceroses without turning into anything more, without, in fact, ever being heard of again. If the only point is that people will become absolutely anything, so long as it runs in herds, Rhinoceros is far too long in making its point. Actually the play is much better farce than satire. The pandemonium of the first...
...Scott (Oct. 5). Judy Holliday is an odd but interesting choice as the star of Laurette, adapted from Marguerite Courtney's excellent, unrestrained biography of her mother, the late Actress Laurette Taylor (Oct. 27). Eli Wallach will take over the role Laurence Olivier created in London in Eugene lonesco's symbolic Rhinoceros, a play in which everyone but the hero, the last individual, turns into a horny beast (Dec. 3). Sir Laurence himself arrives in Jean Anouilh's Becket. With one eye on history and another on the forces that motivate it, the French playwright follows England...
...most "committed" line of lonesco's career, Olivier shouts past the descending curtain: "I'm not giving up!" Chateau en Suede, Frangoise Sagan's first play, following her increasingly dull novels, is the biggest Paris hit in many seasons. Sagan's Castle in Sweden is 18th century, down to the costumes of the inhabitants, who seem like characters from a summery Watteau canvas driven inside by the chill of autumn-but the time is 1960. Dressing up is this family's mildest eccentricity. Beautiful Eleonore is devoted to her husband Hugo, but this has never...