Word: plays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Citing this play in an article in last Sunday's New York Times, the British author Stephen Spender said: "The way in which a talent can be damped down by success to the faintest squeak of social protest is shown (here) ... where the writer's plea for sympathy with the man who gets off with girls in cinemas is a pill covered under about sixteen layers of sugar." True, the play was originally intended as a dramatization of the actual case of a well-known British actor with a taste for young men. But the result, watered down though...
Rathbone is highly effective in the second play, if not quite up to Eric Port-man, who was his Broadway predecessor. He is not yet so much at home in the first play. He is habitually cool, clean, clipped and polished; and it is clearly an effort for him to be awkward, slovenly, and impetuous...
What vocal control and timing she has! Her performance in either play alone would be an impressive achievement. But her ability to undergo such a transformation during intermission is almost uncanny. And this is much more than a change of costume, makeup and wig; she does it through her posture, gait, gesture, diction and other ways. Through extraordinary muscular control, she is able to change her whole repertory of facial contours from those of a stunning beauty to those of an uncomely nobody. Genius is not a word to be tossed about lightly; but Miss Page has unmistakable marks...
...each age I have found a home: I was swaddled in immortality and time was my play-pen. Men burned candles at my altar--in religion, poetry, the sciences. All the professions engendered their terms, and the terms became symbols, and the symbols grew into myths, and the myths became legends. And the legends were allegories, teaching the racial wisdom...
...Winter's Tale, which the Stratford Festival has chosen as its third item in this year's repertory, presents special problems. Unlike The Tempest, it violates the unities of time and place, with a gap of 16 years in the middle. Before the gap, the play is unrelieved tragedy; after the gap, it is mostly pastoral romance. For this reason the more superficial commentators have regarded Tale as two plays. It is one play, however; and this production, under the combined direction of John Houseman and Jack Landau, preserves its oneness successfully...