Word: plangently
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...when sincerely contrite, he is tragic in the superb gallantry of such humor as when, standing handcuffed in the pouring rain, he murmured: "If this is how Her Majesty treats her prisoners, she doesn't deserve to have any." By omitting such touches and emphasizing Wilde's plangent side, and by himself-if often eloquent-being often florid, Mac Liammoir piles Pelion upon Oscar, and turns what he dubs a baroque and rococo story into a rather mawkish and Victorian one. In both men notable showmanship can become mere staginess...
...contrasting twin giants: John Gielgud, whose melodious, grief-numbed Hamlet was this generation's finest, and Laurence Olivier, whose body English makes him Shakespeare's Angry Young Man, forever Hotspur, whether he is a sinuously satanic Richard III, a black-as-thunder Macbeth, or a plangent patriot King, Henry V. Not far behind these triumphs are Maurice Evans' sterling-silver-tongued Richard II, Ralph Richardson's roguishly intelligent Falstaff and Michael Redgrave's mettlesome, love-ravished Antony. They are the leaders of today's functional Shakespeare, in which action flows naturally along the firm...
...play seems a little lonely, a little too distant from its materials, a little too given to mood. Music does service for speech; the Inge touches, the Inge faces, even where effective, seem overfamiliar. Perhaps the play's too plangent and elegiac title helps express what is unsatisfying about its text...
...women loved each other "with a love surpassing that of friendship." Their ardent relationship was only intensified by the fact that male admirers fairly swarmed around both of them-readily swooning when the "dazzling Juliette" draped her graceful neck around a harp and plucked a few plangent twangs, readily reaching for underdoses of poison when frustrated amour demanded the appearances ol a tragic exit...
...miles high." Under the bright lights, he paces his rubber-matted platform, crouching, pointing, swooping upon his acres of audience from one angle, then another. His long-fingered hands are almost constantly in motion, thrusting, carving space, evocatively touching his breast, head, eyes, mouth or ears. His plangent voice hammers the audience with hardly a change of pace...