Word: pipping
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Airman Thompson (Gary Bond), whose nickname is "Pip," has chosen to be conscripted seemingly out of hatred for his father, a general symbolizing all that the Establishment stands for. The officers regard Pip as a traitor to his class and plan to lure or dragoon him back above the salt. His squad mates love to hear stories of Pip's filthy-rich upbringing in a stately 18th century manor, couldn't care less when he tries to ignite their class feeling with tales of the French Revolution, and remain stubbornly suspicious of him as a snob...
...Pip does spark one sizzling scene of class animus at a drunken, brawling Christmas party. The wing commander (Dallas Cavell), a jowly autocrat who regards the conscripts as disgusting animals and wants to see them make a loutish display of themselves, calls for some rock-'n'-roll music. Pip stops the music and coaxes one of the conscripts to sing The Cutty Wren, an old folk song of peasant revolt. It begins with the stilly calm of a Christmas carol, but as the stanzas become more aggressive, the conscripts improvise a louder and louder beat of spoon...
Frightened or not, the officers make Pip doubt the sincerity of his motives, and he pivots on his Achilles' heel right into the officers' ranks. Played out to the anthem of God Save the Queen, the final scene is an ironic blend of parade-ground smartness and mocking bitterness. Pip has been broken, and the conscripts are to be shipped out as clerk fodder. Though Wesker probably intended something more hopeful, his play says in sum that you can't change the bloody upper classes-or the bloody lower classes either...
Perhaps Abbott picked the wrong play, or at least the wrong author: O'Casey's prickly-pear mixture of the gay and the grim, the heartless and the sentimental is often awkward enough. But, then, Richard III is no pip and Abbott did well enough by that, and with, generally speaking, a much less effective cast. Lynn Milgrim, the Juno of this Juno, for instance, could not be better: business-like in her work, gruff in her joy, searing in her grief. Patricia Fay is an honest, spirited Mary Boyle, at once demure and uncompromising. Sheila Forde who appears briefly...
Thus manned (and unmanned), the pip-squeak emblem of U.S. power "shows the flag" along the muddy rivers of Hunan province. Her engine is creaky, her biggest weapon is a tiny three-pounder, but her brass is always shined to a fare-thee-well because a dirty ship means losing face with the local warlords. The zealous captain preaches to the crew on the majesty of what they and the ship represent. Without being aware of it themselves, his men are inwardly nourished by faith in their symbolic superiority. Without any particular malice either, they take for granted that...