Word: mccowen
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...simple audacity of the enterprise is breathtaking. English Actor Alec McCowen, casually dressed in a sports coat and open-necked shirt, strolls onto a stage furnished only with a table and three chairs and recites, from memory, the entire Gospel according to St. Mark, then strolls off again. It is the sort of feat that inevitably is called a tour de force; yet a tour de force is precisely what it is not. The performance, quietly magnificent as it is, nevertheless is purged of all bravura. It is compelling theater that is at the same time nontheatrical...
During some disarmingly offhand remarks made before launching into his text, McCowen makes it clear that he has no theological reasons for choosing Mark over the other Gospels. His concern is with words, not the Word. Mark happens to be the shortest (two hours, ten minutes in this performance, with one intermission) and "the easiest one to tell aloud." The fact that most biblical scholars believe it is also the earliest and the closest to original sources seems to be an incidental benefit...
...exchanges between Equus 'antagonists are scarcely more exciting. Firth's performance, seemingly so natural in a theater, looks artificial in closeup. Burton provides a curiously bland Dysart who lacks the high-pitched emotional constipation that both Anthony Hopkins and Alec McCowen brought to stage productions. Lumet tries to save the day by flooding Burton's speeches with melodramatic lighting and music, but no such makeshift remedy can cure Equus of its congenital limp. - Frank Rich
...Constant Wife. Cleavon Little escaped Mel Brooks' clutches long enough to run off with the notices in Murray Schisgal's flip farce All Over Town, and Elizabeth Ashley returned triumphantly in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The British sent over a generation of stars, including Alec McCowen and Diana Rigg playing together with the finesse of the Lunts in The Misanthrope, John Wood portraying a rapier-sharp Sherlock Holmes, Anthony Hopkins and Peter Firth in the psychological tour de force Equus. Even Liv Ullmann turned up, though in a disappointing production of A Doll's House...
...source of Alceste's passion is made mirror-clear. Diana Rigg is a temptress of dazzling physical allure, a coquette of sportive guile, and her voice has the ring of Baccarat crystal. She is a true daughter of Eros. She could overpower many an actor, but never Alec McCowen. As a perfectionist's perfectionist, he was minted for this role. The way he cocks his head, utters a strangled cry, half raises an arm in arrested protest and drops it, lends a potent, persuasive credence to the outwardly ludicrous yet inwardly poignant image of a frustrated idealist...