Word: prescott
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
MARY TUDOR (439 pp.)-H.F.M. Prescott-Macmillan...
...lived and how well-deserving of the same epithet were "Bluff King Hal" (her father) and "Good Queen Bess" (her half sister). But none has succeeded in presenting Mary against the background of her time with quite the acumen and diligence of H. F. M. (for Hilda Frances Margaret) Prescott, a sometime Oxford lecturer and novelist (The Man on a Donkey-TIME. Sept. 22. 1952). First published (under the title Spanish Tudor) in 1940, Mary Tudor is an enlarged, revised version of a first-rate work of scholarship...
Only occasionally, however, does The Prescott Proposals achieve any effect with these elements. The explanation lies in the authors' failure to make the committee scenes absorbing as theatre. In the first and last scenes, the international flavor of the play serves, as it should, to heighten the interest of the plot. The plot retreats, however, in the U.N. scenes and the play depends solely and vainly on the dramatic originality of a U.N. committee session on stage to retain the attention of the audience. While there is certainly an essential interest in this setting, in the gathering of nations around...
Contributing to the tedium of The Prescott Proposals are other weaknesses. It is, for example, rather difficult to accept Mrs. Prescott's proposals, that the United Nations examine and try to extend areas of agreement, rather than concentrate on areas of disagreement, as holding out promise for "the saving of Western Civilization." Yet only by seeing the proposals as immensely significant, can the audience be very excited by the threatened ruin of the plan when the Czech U.N. Delegate and former lover of Mrs. Prescott inconsiderately drops dead in her bedroom. Nor without accepting the importance of the proposals...
Slightly obscuring the weakness of the play is the general competence of the cast. Felix Aylmer is a restrained and amiable British Delegate, and Ben Astar capitalizes on a remarkable resemblance to Malenkov in a convincing, and not wholly unsympathetic portrayal of the Russian Delegate. As Mrs. Prescott, Katherine Cornell is a little hearty in her portrayal of the brilliant career-woman, but she clutches at furniture with appropriate intensity in her distraught moments...