Word: pranksterism
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...long it will take for U.S. actors to measure up to it were swiftly revealed on opening night. Director Guthrie elected to do an uncut Hamlet in modern dress, and he provided some of the eye-catchers that make purists accuse him of being a theatrical prankster: mourners with black umbrellas at Ophelia's burial; a Laertes who waves a revolver in Claudius' face and a Claudius who gets the revolver and slyly pockets the cartridges, like a silent-movie badman. If Guthrie seems to scramble his props, mixing candles with flashlights, snap-brim fedoras with Kaiser Wilhelm...
...began his career as a talented prankster. In his famous opera Neues vom Tage (News of the Day), he reversed all the conventional numbers; a hate duet replaced a love duet and a divorce ensemble took the place of a wedding march. He also wrote a one-act opera, Das Nusch-Nuschi, designed it for performance by Burmese marionettes, and worked in a parody of Tristan that outraged loyal Wagnerians. Since those high old days of the 1920s, Paul Hindemith has turned more serious, and his enormous output (including such masterpieces as the opera Mathis der Maler, the symphonies Symphonische...
...insured (no national treasures are), and Her Majesty's government could hardly be expected to pay ransom-the most logical motive for most of the other robberies. At week's end, Scotland Yard was leaning to the theory that it was the work of some ingenious prankster with a highly dramatic sense of history. After all, the theft took place just 50 years to the day after a superpatriotic Italian workman named Vincenzo Perugia repatriated the Mono, Lisa for a time by sneaking it out of the Louvre...
Laura is not the street's only eccentric. There is Big Foot, a solemn and terrifying prankster who expresses his view of an unwashed world by getting a job driving a bus, hauling his passengers five miles beyond the city, and then forcing them to get out and bathe. There is Man-Man, who writes random words in the street, repeating a vowel for several blocks if he likes its looks. Author Naipaul, a native of Trinidad, understands well that his comical characters do not live comic lives, and his best sketches are shaded with compassion. When police drag...
...precociously scholarly tot. At six, he could read Virgil, knew Latin and the Bible thoroughly. At Eton he copped almost every prize except the Newcastle scholarship; the boy who beat him crammed so hard that all his hair fell out. No crammer, Ronald was a bit of a prankster. He particularly disliked Classmate Hugh Dalton, later Chancellor of the Exchequer. On an exam paper asking "What are the oldest parts of the book of Exodus?" Ronald altered Dalton's paper to read "oddest," and the future politico listed all of the grosser passages...