Word: shaw
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...GEORGE BERNARD SHAW...
Caesar and Cleopatra is afflicted by the mummy's curse. Despite two or three of the best scenes in the Shavian canon, the play itself may be unworkable: lines by Shaw but construction by Rube Goldberg. Offstage there are battles, mob scenes and the endless clumping of Roman legions. Onstage there are only words; even in this finger exercise for Pygmalion Shaw seemed to be heading toward what he later called playwriting as a "platonic exercise...
...dull as it is dutiful. Scenes change with astonishing rapidity, but the action seems regulated by an hourglass - an illusion whose secret is best left with Rabb and the Sphinx. Ironically, the one liberty the director has taken, a vigorous pruning to keep the play within two hours, makes Shaw's needlessly complicated plot simply baffling...
...scenery and the costumes, which cost $300,000, are a dazzling plus. But the acting is, surprisingly, no more than competent. Elizabeth Ashley is a vital Cleopatra - half alley cat, half Queen - but more Shakespeare's lady of the Nile than Shaw's. Rex Harrison's Caesar is a burnt-out case who does not seem to remember what it was like to be warm - let alone what it was like to be Caesar. Gerald Clarke
Thus British Historian E.E.Y. Hales sets the stage for an engaging theological fantasy that would have done credit to the late Anglican author C.S. Lewis. Like Lewis' Great Divorce and George Bernard Shaw's Don Juan section of Man and Superman, Chariot of Fire suggests that hell is what one makes of it -and so is heaven...