Word: rattigan
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Ross, by British Playwright Terence (Separate Tables) Rattigan, opened last week with Alec Guinness as Lawrence of Arabia. A complex, 16-scene production, the play reaches brilliantly, perhaps too slickly, into its legendary hero's mind, illuminating but never completely resolving the essential enigma: Was Lawrence the spectacular hero who inspired and led the Arabs in their World War I revolt against the Turks, or was he a lying, unstable charlatan...
With the alias John Hume Ross, Lawrence sought anonymity at the height of his fame (1922) by joining the R.A.F. as an ordinary airman (his later and more famous pseudonym was Shaw). Playwright Rattigan's account begins in the barracks, uses a series of flashbacks to go at the hero's question: "Oh, Ross. How did I become you?" As Guinness of Arabia, Sir Alec is at his subtle, suggestive best, and even the physical resemblance is striking. In his radicalism, there is more than a hint of the showoff; in his sophistication, a climber's cunning...
...play's climax, a captured Lawrence is subjected to torture and homosexual assault by the Turks, and Rattigan plainly suggests that in the attack the will-god broke and fell, as Lawrence realized at last the truth of his own perversion. Not everyone agreed with Playwright Rattigan's picture of Lawrence, but, wrote Critic T. C. W^orsely: "As one view of the enigma, this will impose itself for a long time." Rhinoceros, Avant-Gardist Eugene lonesco's new play, opened with Sir Laurence Olivier triumphing over the din-and-delirium direction of Orson Welles, lonesco...
...while he prepared his own Open End talk show for New York's gabby Channel 13 and juggled projects that will keep him busy from Broadway to Hollywood well into 1963, he also rode herd simultaneously on two diverse TV spectaculars: a 1½-hour adaptation of Terence Rattigan's familiar The Browning Version, and a two-hour edition of Sally Benson's equally familiar collection of all-American corn, Meet Me in St. Louis...
...Pont Show of the Month (CBS, 8-9:30 p.m.), starring Sir John Gielgud and Margaret Leighton, in a superior version of The Browning Version, Terence Rattigan's sentimental play about an embittered British schoolmaster and the little boy who gives him back his self-respect...