Word: rubashov
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Ronald Coralian, who is surely one of the College's best actors, gives a relentlessly taut performance as Rubashov, doomed. He plays with conviction and never moves away from the heart of a long and great part. Sharon Connolley, the bourgeois temptation who is a symbol of the humanity that he finds foreign to the Party, succeeds in conveying simplicity in a very complex world; she has a presence. William Noble, in the role of 402 who occupies the cell next to Rubashov, plays with primitive charm and excitement. Alfred Bakhash, another prisoner, presents a remarkable caricature in the first...
Travis Linn and David Pursley, as Ivanov and Gletkin respectively, seem physically very young for their imposing roles as interrogators of Rubashov. Pursley's Indoor Athletic Building haircut perhaps gives the impression in his case. But both act with ease and are reasonable representations of Party hacks...
...good deal simpler and more sinister than what Koestler imagined. The 1949 show trial of Hungary's Communist Foreign Minister Laszlo Rajk read as if it had been taken from Koestler's pages. Apparently for reasons of party unity, Rajk, like Koestler's Rubashov, confessed in court to treasonable deviation. But no relentless interrogator was needed to persuade Rajk to confess. The job was done by Rajk's friend Janos Kadar, now the puppet Premier of Hungary...
...Elmer Davis, that eminent piece of journalistic litmus paper, that ex-Communists are bores. But Koestler is no bore. He transformed history into literature of such reality that it, in turn, became history. His masterpiece, Darkness at Noon, was based on the Moscow trials and told how 01d Bolshevik "Rubashov" confessed falsely to a plot against the party, because confession was "the last service" he could render the party. While Koestler was writing that novel, Walter Krivitsky, ex-head of Soviet Military Intelligence for Western Europe, was writing a factual account of how a false confession had been extracted from...
Still the actors took no chances: on opening night last week, they went out of the way to give unconvincing performances. Just's Rubashov, snapped a critic, was "a melancholy Don Quixote of the Revolution," and the rest of the actors were only "bearers of cues." Detmold's Red newspaper, Volks-Echo, lambasted the cast and said with a snarl: "Its resistance broke down easily before the propaganda offerings of the Fascist warmongers." Even in taking out Red insurance policies, the actors found themselves refused. The reason given by the insurance company: weak hearts...