Word: medea
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Medea. 5. Crime and Punishment...
Those who have seen Benjamin Britten find it hard to believe that he could conceive so violent a play as Peter Grimes: it is almost like Baby Snooks reading lines from Medea. He is the kind of person no one remembers meeting at a party. Usually to be seen in a loose tweed coat, slacks and sweater, his hands habitually stuffed into his pockets, he has a rather tight, lean, nosy face which wrinkles easily into a vinegarish smile under a widow's peak of crinkly hair. He has a very English embarrassment about expressing emotion about anything...
Broadway's Judith Anderson, hair-raising star of Medea (adapter: Robinson Jeffers), responded to a request by the Saturday Review of Literature for a list of her current reading. Besides the collected poems of Robinson Jeffers, Actress Anderson, who plays eight hard shows a week, listed one current novel, a couple of biographies, Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, the collected works of Charles Dickens, the collected works of William Shakespeare, James Joyce's Ulysses, the Bible...
Appalling and terrible, Medea is somehow yet understandable and real-her emotions less hidden in the mists of the past than an Oedipus' or an Antigone's. And with a temerity as notable as her talent, Actress Anderson (Macbeth, The Three Sisters) brought those emotions spectacularly out into the open. She flung aside both classic control and realistic restraint. She played Medea half in the grand manner, half in the Grand Guignol manner; she used every wile of body and face, every art of voice and gesture, to produce something possibly mixed or impure-but definitely, undeniably overwhelming...
...went," of Euripides' drama about five years ago at the urging of Actress Anderson and especially for her. He dedicated his work to her, though he had seen her act only once-in a California presentation of his Greekish Tower Beyond Tragedy. The whacking Broadway success of Medea has made up to Jeffers the recent Broadway failure of a dramatization of his poem, Dear Judas (TIME, Oct. 20). The 60-year-old poet thinks now that he might even try writing an original play "if I knew what to write about...