Word: maugham
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...Constant Wife (by Somerset Maugham) still seems very pleasant after 25 years. It gets by no means the right production; it is certainly not topnotch Maugham. But it starts, weaknesses and all, beyond the point where most popular comedy leaves...
...Maugham is Britain's last playwright with Restoration blood in his veins. It is very cold blood; feeling curdles the comedy of manners. It can tingle at naughtiness, but it treats sex as a springboard rather than a swimming pool. Maugham's Constance Middleton can pretend ignorance of her husband's affair with her best friend, can lie to save them when the other husband learns the truth. And-for all that she and Middleton have fallen amiably out of love-she will not herself take a lover until she earns a living, is no more...
...play wanders through a whole drawing-room world of deception and self-deception, of complacent male stupidity and bland female betrayal. The wit less dazzles than disconcerts, as in the Maugham test of true love: "Could you use his toothbrush?" But The Constant Wife, in any case, is less a triumph of wit than of tone...
...Somerset Maugham Theater (Mon. 9:30 p.m., NBC). Eddie Albert in Smith Serves...
Most modern short story writers like to keep their tales within easy commuting distance of everyday life. Not so, Wilbur Daniel Steele, 65, who rejoices in being a reactionary and flavorful old fogy. Like Conrad and Maugham, he prefers to clamp a character in the vise of a strange situation, watch him wriggle toward nobility, degradation, or death. At his best, Author Steele can stir a jigger of irony, a dash of adventure, a sprig of the exotic and a pinch of mystery into a tippling good yarn. At his worst, he makes the tricks of Fate look like...