Word: louts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...page. Sizing up the woman's pleasant study, the man thinks, "I wouldn't like it if my wife had a room like this." Like a weary warrior goddess, Lessing views the seduction step by monstrous step. The woman gives in out of pity for the lout. "The stupid cow, the slut," he concludes...
...ignores every dramatic basic. It lacks conflict. Its characters are unreal and undeveloped, and it fosters no affinity between the playgoer and the players. Noah's three sons are, respectively, a lout (Shem), a lecher (Ham) and a moral prig (Japheth). Noah straightens out their biblically unrecorded sexual hang-ups like a pre-lst century marriage counselor and spars in spurious stage-generation-gap fashion with his youngest son, who is skeptical about the Divine Establishment...
...choice of Welfare Cadilac seemed especially peculiar. Written five years ago by Guy Drake, a sort of combination Pa Kettle-Tex Ritter, the song portrays the welfare recipient as an improvident lout battening on the public purse. ("This house that I live in is mine but it's really a shack, but I always manage somehow to drive me a brand-new Cadilac...
...apart is extravagantly funny performances by Wilder, Griffith and-especially-Sutherland. Wilder's frenetic talents are perfectly pitched to the neurasthenic Philippe de Sisi. Griffith wears his patented oblique stare of incipient insanity as the feckless, fatuous Louis. Sutherland is both immensely vital and painstakingly subtle. His lumbering lout is a Gallic version of Steinbeck's Lennie. Yet with a tiny moue he transforms the sow's-ear peasant into a silken, purse-lipped aristocrat. Alternately bumbling and mincing, Sutherland irreverently manages to impale both egalite and elegance...
...melancholy tutor: her husband. He is an alcoholic brute who keeps her in the country when her only heaven is London. As the chase quickens, the ladies profess virtues which they could scarcely wish to possess. The feint and parry of amour ends well, with the lout of a husband paid off for a divorce and the pairs of lovers united. One does not regret the convention that they will live happily ever after, but one does regret somewhat the amount of time that they have to be kept apart onstage. Anticipation is an overrated pleasure. However, the play does...