Word: magnus
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Thus The Apple Cart caused a mild furore in 1929 because Socialist Shaw put in a good word, not to say several magnificent speeches, for monarchy. Shaw's English King Magnus is far more public-spirited, high-minded and civilized than the Labor Prime Minister and, as it turns out, a shrewder tactician. Heckled for such a political about-face, Shaw insisted-in one of those prefaces of his which are more like second times at bat-that King and Prime Minister not only are not winner and loser, but are not even basic antagonists. "The conflict," Shaw asserts...
...Shaw is resounding an old standard theme, he works variations-and even a fantasia-upon it. He can jiggle his royal puppet in the classic role of the Patriot King; he can even make a kind of If-I-Were-King of Magnus. The Socialist Bernard can act a Strong Man on the throne, a Passionless Shepherd in the boudoir. The disbeliever in monarchy can suggest that a constitutional monarch be flagrantly unconstitutional, and can have him retain his throne by threatening to abdicate and prove ten times as troublesome in Parliament...
...play probably has enough serviceable tricks, enough scattered brilliance, enough second-bounce for a superlative production to bring the whole thing off. The current production is no more than a very competent one; it cannot convey a needed sense of grand-staircased crescendoes and crystal-chandeliered wit. As Magnus, Maurice Evans has his real virtues, and the right polished utterance, but for parry-and-thrust he uses a gold-headed cane instead of a rapier, and he seems in manner more tutorial than ironic...
Concerts of old music tend to elicit in the performers a misplaced picty that results in a persistently dragging tempo. With the sole exception of a 12th-century hymn to St. Magnus, no piece on the program suffered in this respect...
Gladstone, by Philip Magnus. Probably the best biography ever written of the eminent British statesman who thought that God was a Liberal (TIME...