Word: millares
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Ronald Millar's Affair, on the other hand, is quite a poor play (irritating, too, for it is not nearly so good as it should be), but its shortcomings have nothing to do with any blunders by Sir Charles. Perhaps Millar would have done better to choose some other novel and novelist in the first place: Snow's books are wordy enough, goodness knows, but they're not especially talky; dialogue is usually reserved for the moments of climactic self-revelation hoarded by Lewis Eliot, who then mumbles them over in his tortuous brain, and fills most of the rest...
Obviously, Millar had to dispense with Eliot's woollyminded ruminations, and, probably, he had to retain what little dialogue Snow himself wrote in order to claim any connection with the novel; the effect of his dramatization, is to bury Snow's lines and blur whatever impact they may have had in the book...
...Millar has also managed to foul up the pace of The Affair. One of the most impressive elements of any Snow novel is its slow, heavy, deliberative--almost inexorable--progress: each move, when it comes, seems inevitable, and there are seldom any false steps. In the play, though, everything happens at once. Tempers flare, men change sides and jump around the Common Room with the speed and effectiveness of Harold Lloyd. Again, of course, the novel's deliberate speed would admittedly have been deathly on the stage, so Millar had to do something; but, again, too, Millar's answer...
...Affair, faithfully adapted by Ronald Millar from the novel by C.P. Snow, is set in the leather-chaired somnolence of a common room at Cambridge, and makes it crackle with the charges and countercharges of a courtroom trial. Dramatically, the play accumulates tension without generating passion. But for the theatergoer who is willing to forgo emotional nourishment, it provides a stimulating mental feast...
Snow's The Affair, which had a good run last season as adapted for the London stage by Ronald Millar, now comes to New York (Sept. 20). How Much? is Lillian Hellman's new play, an adaptation of a novel about an old woman whose family is energetically trying to ship her off to a nursing home forever (February...