Word: pharaoh
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...Firstborn (by Christopher Fry), begun in 1938, was first staged in 1948 at the Edinburgh Festival. A stiffly earnest play, it is laid in Egypt and centered in Moses. With the Pharaoh persecuting the Jews, a Moses already estranged from the palace of his upbringing turns wholly to the people of his birth. In the conflict, Pharaoh's young son Rameses sympathizes with the oppressed: but when the firstborn in every Egyptian family is struck down, the humane royal firstborn perishes with the rest...
...rhetoric than that he had misapplied it. His literary conceits, his verbal arabesques suffocate anything truly alive. Half don, half dandy, Fry was to find himself in mannerism rather than substance, in the mocking wink rather than the observing eye. Despite Katharine Cornell's regal efforts as Pharaoh's sister, or trumpet-voiced Anthony Quayle's as Moses, the Egypt of The Firstborn is mummified. Only Boris Aronson's sets evoke something once living and still large...
...does make Moses a magnetic leader, a man of inspiration, a man whose motives and courses of action, often at odds with practicality or common sense, are hard for others--and sometimes Moses himself--to understand. Despite all this, the audience develops as much sympathy for Fry's Pharaoh as for his Moses...
...minor characters with whom Author Hauser has rounded out her novel. Among them: a booze-prone church organist who bikes his empties out into the country rather than stash the incriminatory bottles in his ash barrel; a lady reincarnationist who believes she once dined with a Pharaoh; the town's Mary Magdalene with whom Floyd finds it sweet to sin. These and other forlorn rebels form a kind of Freudian chorus attesting the ego-twisting power of convention...
...Warning. Snorted Rio's respected Correio da Manhã: "The title of President Kubitschek should be changed to Pharaoh of Brasilia." Cried onetime Finance Minister Eugenio Gudin: "A crime! Those factors of production wasted on the dream of a new capital will be missed...