Word: priggishness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
ANOTHER SHAVIAN hero here is the shrewd servant Louka (played convincingly by Roberta Dahlberg) who without pondering irrelevantly about higher love, cashes in on Sergius's moral earnestness to gain a betrothal. Stephen Kolzak turns in a priggish performance as the servile servant Nicola. The casting that sets the tone for the production, however, is that of hulking Tom Shea and lisping Lois Pike as Raina's parents. They are real bulls in the china shop...
...years later she became pregnant by and finally married William Godwin, the brilliant though priggish political philosopher, who was publicly opposed to matrimony. Five months after the wedding, a doctor with unwashed hands attended the birth of her daughter Mary. Wollstonecraft died of septicemia eleven days later. The final indignity was more ironic. When Godwin published his memoirs of Mary, he was honest about her love affairs, suicide attempts and pregnancies but apparently misunderstood the meaning of her life and death. He wrote about her, as Biographer Tomalin observes, "as the female Werther, a romantic and tragic heroine," ignoring...
...priggish majordomo Malvolio is the play's pivotal role. He is, along with Shylock, one of Shakespeare's two great comic butts. Malvolio was modeled on Sir William Knollys, Queen Elizabeth's puritanical and much ridiculed comptroller. Both Malvolio and Shylock were so richly written, however, that later ages have often found the roles sympathetic and even tragic. Both offer much leeway to directors and actors. Here, Philip Kerr '63 offers a thoroughly dour and self-inflated misfit who deserves the gulling he gets. In this production, not only is he imprisoned in a dark cell as a lunatic...
...boys, or men, arrive, and it gradually becomes clear that class escalation has taken a toll. Stripping away the complex humanity of Storey's characterizations, one sees that the eldest son has become an acerbic, vengeful fire brand; the middle son, a priggish, glossy Establishment apologist; and the young est a haunted, weepy, torn-apart teacher. What is immediately apparent is that the emotional ground between parents and sons has been land-mined. Affections that are not actually felt are masked in billboards ("To the finest mother and the finest dad") while genuine feelings of tenderness are muted...
...lesser characters, the four guests all do a creditable job, particularly Alden Watson as Richard Greatham. His style of controlled bewilderment and priggish dismay enlivens the potentially flat role of the conservative diplomat. Jill Abramson vamps madly in her part as the inane and brainless ingenue, but her squeaky voice, exaggerated walk, and batting eyes quickly become tiresome. Joanna Blum is convincing as the sophisticated woman-about-town who tries (to no avail) to pull the Bliss family out of their hopeless theatrics. She, like Abramson, has a formula of winking eyes and sleek walk which loses its charm after...