Word: shavianly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Shining Sticks. With Don Juan in Hell, Laughton is tossing a sizable bone to the culture-starved. Don Juan, the seldom-played third act of Shaw's Man and Superman, is a dream sequence that is short on dramatic action and two hours long on Shavian talk about sex, marriage, war & peace, science, religion, literature, politics and man's fate. Before it was tried by Laughton and the other talented members of the cast (Charles Boyer, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Agnes Moorehead), Don Juan had never had a major U.S. production. "The longest theatrical aside in the history...
Luigi Pirandello's Right You Are (If You Think You Are) is at first glance a grotesque mixture of Shaw and Cervantes. Its moral is the gospel of Don Quixote, that the only reality lies in men's dreams and visions, and its dramatic technique, is the old Shavian play of subverting story for an intellectual theme. There is no such thing as objective truth, says Pirandello, and he manipulates his puppets to prove his point...
Cornelius van Dongen was one of the original fauves (wild beasts) of modern art. Today he is one of the tamest pets of Paris. At 75, he is a dapper and well-to-do gentleman who sports a Shavian beard and has a well-appointed studio on the fashionable Rue de Courcelles. Over the past 30 years he has become the most successful portrait painter in France. His models: just about everyone from Maurice Chevalier to Queen Marie of Rumania...
Consistent character is absent from the play as a whole as well. Farce, comedy, and boredom succeed each other slickly at random. Visual gags, political "humor," pseudo-Shavian epigrams, and Joe Miller favorites mingle democratically with a handful of really comic situations...
Barefoot has some good scenes and some good writing, but suffers even more from lack of sensibility and of art than from lack of drama. It has snatches of Shavian cleverness jostling scraps of Socratic wisdom and ponderous suggestions of The Private Life of Helen of Troy. A dramatically pointless harlot tags after a comic-strip King of Sparta; and in direct competition with perhaps the most nobly serene death scene in history, Anderson introduces one all his own. Dramatists rightly take liberties; but Drinkwater did not have Lincoln assassinated at Gettysburg, and Shaw refrained from having Joan devoured...