Word: macgowran
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Died. Jack MacGowran, 54, Irish actor who, while moving from meager bit parts in Dublin's Abbey Theater to meaty roles in television, stage and film (as the fool in King Lear, the mad soldier in How I Won the War), earned his best notices interpreting the work of his playwright friends Sean O'Casey and Samuel Beckett; of heart disease; in Manhattan, where he was playing in O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars (TIME...
What goes wrong with the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater revival is that O'Casey's people are ineluctably Irish, and this cast, with one exception, playacts at being Irish. The exception is Jack MacGowran, who is vastly impressive as Fluther Good, a cocky, reeling indomitable sparrow of a man with wistful repentance on the brain and wet wit on his tongue...
...MacGowran) reduces the full irony that the Fool is a sage in motley...
...part of the scenery. Onstage, the actor is at the incandescent center of the action. He incarnates the flame of truth and beauty invested in him by the playwright to be passed on to the audience. Thus one can say that Scofield is perfectly all right as Lear, that MacGowran is a good Fool and that Irene Worth is especially good as Goneril, the oldest and ugliest daughter. Then, too, Alan Webb sensitively portrays the Duke of Gloucester, whose eyes are gouged out with stomach-churning realism. But the instantaneous afterthought is that though these actors have done absolutely superb...
...between movies. Last week's premiere featured Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach in Murray Schisgal's The Typists, a talky tragicomedy about two white-collar mediocrities spilling out the empty cup of their lives. The high night of the season should come next month with Jack MacGowran's readings from Beckett; instead of remounting the show on the stark set designed for its off-Broadway run last year, PBS is spectacularly but improbably staging the work in the Mojave Desert...