Word: rubashov
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Sidney Kingsley's dramatic adaptation of Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon" has finally come to Boston after a successful year in New York. Somewhere between Broadway and the Colonial Theater, Edward G. Robinson has assumed the major role of Rubashov, played by Claude Raines in the New York production. Many critics have considered Raines' portrayal of the old Bolshevik as his greatest role, but it would be difficult to improve upon the provable, disheartened, tragic Rubashov which Robinson creates...
...plot is quite simple. An old man, once a leader of the Russian revolution, is arrested during the Communist purge trials of 1937, and his prosecutor uses terrifying intimidation to get a confession from him. Rubashov was one of the hundreds of old Bolsheviks whose deviation from the Stalinist "means justifies the end" philosophy meant certain death. His final hours are occupied by a challenge--he must decide between a silent, unobserved death, which would follow a confession for many crimes he did not commit, or death after a trial where he could speak out heroically against the new Bolshevism...
...Rubashov's prosecutor is Gletkin, played by Leo Gordon. In the book, Koestler successfully implied that Gletkin was unimportant in Rubashov's life, that the prosecutor was only a piece of complicated Stalinist machinery--inflexible, inhuman, and moral. However, in the Kingsley play, Gordon's steel-like portrayal was awkward and overplayed. Lois Nettleton took the part of Rubashov's mistress and secretary, and was quite persuasive in proving her loyalty...
Frederick Fox's scenery was extremely effective. The Russian prison looked dark and formidable, and three tiers of cells were erected on the stage. The cell walls were made of a material which would become transparent with the use of lights, so that flash-backs, showing Rubashov moving from his 1937 cell directly to a pre-Revolutionary meeting, could occur without changing scenery or lowering the curtains...
Those who appear in other cells in the prison, tapping on the stone to communicate with each other, and those in flashbacks of Rubashov's life, are also carefully and even passionately portrayed. Joanna Brown is a moving and, at the same time, strong Lube, Rubshov's secretary and lover. She, more than any other in the cast, acts with both clarity and emotion. Theodore Gershuny plays Gletkin, the brutish child of the new order, with admirable force, but a little too much vehemence. Ivanoff, Gletkin's predecessor as commandant of the prison, is intelligently and smoothly acted by Michael...