Word: plowright
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...drama about a desperately lonely girl who takes love-and the resultant misery-where she can find it, written by Shelagh Delaney when only 19, has turned out to be one of the season's first dramatic hits. The dialogue is true and the lead performance by Joan Plowright uncannily...
...part closeups, without all the characters being equally real (the mother is not always seen in focus and is played by Angela Lansbury too much for farce). But if there is a want of art to A Taste of Honey, there is equally a want of contrivance, and Joan Plowright's brilliant portrayal of the girl raises the play at its best from gifted 19 to full maturity...
Before she arrived to do the play, American audiences were vaguely familiar with Joan Plowright as the apparent choice to be the next wife of Sir Laurence Olivier. Now they know her as an actress worthy of the part. Daughter of a Lincolnshire newspaper editor, she got her impulse toward the stage from her mother, who as a girl ran away three times to become an actress but "was fetched back three times because it wasn't considered respectable." Joan had her first acting experience with her mother's amateur theatrical group...
...year-old when you're 25"). It was her work in the company that brought her to the attention of Olivier-she was his daughter in The Entertainer, his warmhearted, empty-headed girl last season in Rhinoceros. "Actresses used to be sort of gilded butterflies," says Joan Plowright, "but now we've become a part of life in England...
...Lesson, a mad professor harangues and finally kills an odd, 17-year-old student (played as winningly by Joan Plowright as she plays the 94-year-old wife in The Chairs). The play perhaps symbolizes how pedantry destroys individuality, but like so much anti-academic satire, runs to academic jokes. Ionesco's seems an agreeable but thin talent, with a kind of philosophic-puppet show appeal...