Word: ruses
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Snap's custom to invite to his home as heavily paying guests the more affluent and well-favored of the criminals in his charge. Thus, when the play begins, the company includes the paunchy rascal Jonathan Wild, a decadent nobleman calling himself Count La Ruse, and one Cartwright, a callow poet incarcerated for debt...
...last two pay court to the gaoler's daughter, Laetitia, a disturbing and extremely decollete presence in this penumbrous house. The poet learns some of the less poetical things about women when La Ruse's carnality triumphs over his own romanticizing. But even La Ruse feels it necessary to escape the unhealthy witchery of Laetitia, which he does by suicide; not, however, before he has affectionately given young Cartwright enough money to pay his debts. Meanwhile Jonathan Wild is taken out and hanged, and an elegant, periwigged Lord, the poisoner of his wife and most of his relatives...
Mary Ellis's Laetitia is an exciting and frightening creation; Basil Sydney's La Ruse is morbid and passionate; the lesser parts are splendidly done. Yet only in the last act do these characters produce the witty, sardonic tensions which you expect of them. The early moments of the play remain listless while Playwright Mayer's dialog is getting up momentum. Waterloo Bridge. Close by Waterloo railway station in London is a bridge upon whose parapet are posted sooty little strumpets waiting for soldiers returning home on leave. A German air raid sends them scurrying to their...