Word: mistressful
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SHAKESPEARE WALLAH. An Indian playboy (Shashi Kapoor) wavers between his movie-star mistress (Madhur Jaffrey) and an English actress (Felicity Kendal) who is touring the provinces with a troupe of tatty Shakespeareans. The real show is U.S. Director James Ivory's delicate study of fading British influence in India...
...language and the proximate cause of the grand tradition of the grotesque that runs through Anglo-American letters from Wuthering Heights to Yoknapatawpha County. Reason enough to exhume the hoary old horror and reissue its haunting license. But there are still better reasons. In the game of suspense, Mistress Radcliffe can tease with the best of them, and in the art of natural description she can pile a crag or plummet a chasm with any man short of Scott himself. True, the dear lady is one of the ickiest prigs who ever put quill to scented paper...
...mistress of ceremonies, played by Blyth Danner, announces that three hobos will re-enact the scene in which they discovered and buried the body of Joseph Axminster, another vagabond, so that his two friends in the audience will know what became of him. She also announces that the back of the stage--bare except for a crate that becomes Axminster's coffin and some stools--is the municipal garbage dump and that off to the right is a jail. Her best acting is done later in the show when she play's Axminster's dead body...
Dennison might have been able to salvage the play with incisive dialogue or characterization. Instead he lets the hobos--philosophers, the mistress of ceremonies calls them--mumble some chit-chat about death and human woe. Sometimes they paraphrase the Bible ("Man is dust--that's the main thing"), and sometimes, like one of Beckett's characters, they talk of how it would be better not to have been born...
SHAKESPEARE WALLAH. An Indian playboy (Shashi Kapoor) wavers between his movie-star mistress (Madhur Jaffrey) and an English actress (Felicity Kendal) who is touring the provinces with a troupe of tatty Shakespeareans. But the real show is U.S. Director James Ivory's delicate study of fading British influence in India...