Word: shaffer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Broadway BLACK COMEDY. What people do, say and discover in the dark, is the single droll conceit on which Peter Shaffer's convulsively amusing farce is based. An acrobatically agile cast, including Michael Crawford, Geraldine Page and Lynn Redgrave bring the monkeyshines to a high polish...
Black Comedy by Peter Shaffer is an unflaggingly funny drawing-room farce based on a single droll conceit: what might people do and say and discover about each other if they were suddenly left in a total blackout on the evening of a vitally important party? To begin with, this poses a little problem of stagecraft: How do you present actors in the dark and still allow the audience to see them? Simple: by reversing things. When the lights are supposed to be on, the stage is dark; when they are suddenly supposed to go out, the stage blazes with...
...flit-and-run sight gags of the evening is Crawford's desperately adroit and maladroit effort to sneak the antiques back to the rightful owner's flat. By the time that Crawford's mistress (Geraldine Page) makes her unseen appearance, it is clear that British Playwright Shaffer has skimmed the most risibility from invisibility since the old Topper films...
Black Comedy's monkeyshines are brought to a high polish by an acrobatically agile cast, but the players might have been spared some arm-and-leg-work if Playwright Shaffer had pared the show and tightened the pace. Choosing to be optically antic, he evades the opportunity to show how the eye lies and the mind's eye ferrets out reality -which might have given the evening more intellectual relish, a sort of Pirandello flavor. In a one-act opener called White Lies, Shaffer tries to be wise rather than clever about lovers and lovelessness. As an impoverished...
...THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIES (CBS, 9-11 p.m.). Five Finger Exercise (1962), the film version of Peter Shaffer's play, starring Rosalind Russell, Jack Hawkins and Maximilian Schell...