Word: riggs
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George (Michael Hordern), an unfashionable middle-aged philosopher, scarcely registers any of this. He is busy dictating lecture notes for a symposium on the subject: "God-good, bad, or indifferent?" His much younger wife Dottie (Diana Rigg), a prematurely retired musical comedy star, is concerned about the sudden obsolescence of moon lyrics and sees "great breakage" ahead. Her own has apparently already occurred. She is receiving questionable mental therapy (and even more questionable physical therapy) from the vice chancellor of George's university. It is to Dottie that Stoppard entrusts what may be his fundamental conviction: that a world...
...pushes this and related theses with antic wordplay, inspired zaniness and crackerjack wit. The evening would sag in spots if it were not for Hordern. What might have been simply a caricature of an absent-minded professor emerges as a warmly affectionate portrait of the last living humanist. And Rigg is lovely to look at, especially in the nude, and to listen to as she delivers her lines with a resolute intelligence that seems to unbend the pretzel twists of thought...
...DOES anyone fall in love? Does it have more to do with the faller of the fallee? Could Rigg have been anybody; is Scott just looking for an excuse to fill in the space in his life? And Rigg-is she just seeking someone to enliven the boredom of her life with Daddy in Mexico? And, after all, what's wrong with that? In America, in 1972, one person may encounter a hundred others with whom he could fairly happily spend the rest of his life-or at least ten years. One at a time is all you need...
Scott the doctor makes his decision, but it involves more than just himself: should he save scores of patients or should he first save himself and Rigg by fleeing with her to Mexico? With about the profundity of a television script-Chayefsky is a veteran TV writer-Hospital examines such Pressing Issues of Modern Times. The hospital is in the midst of a community whose members are parading around outside holding unconvincing placards and demanding that the hospital relinquish its development land to the people; there's an abortion which provides contemporary color but gives no hint of its potentially...
...demonstrators are chanting outside, the slimy capitalist is trying to cull support for his encounter with the hospital director, the director is going frantic trying to stave off the demonstrators. Meanwhile patients are mislaid, the bookkeeper harasses a dying man to get his Blue Shield number, and Scott and Rigg are carrying on their own private tug-of-war over whether to stay or go to Mexico, she dressed in a nurse's uniform because her blouse had been ripped...