Word: shylocking
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...this production, all the great roles of the play are expertly handled. The central character is, of course, the wise, bookish philosopher-magician Prospero, who prospers indeed in the hands of Morris Carnovsky. Carnovsky's performance is one to put with the unsurpassable Shylock he achieved three years ago. He brings a resonant voice, great dignity, and deep understanding to a most difficult role. He is even able to command attention all through his long opening narrative. And towards the end, after his most famous speech, when he says, "A turn or two I'll walk, To still my beating...
...battlements of Yugoslavia's 12th century Lovrijenac fortress, the ghost of Hamlet's father spurs his son's revenge; deep in Russia, at Tashkent, the jealous Moor strangles the blameless Desdemona. A marble shard's throw from the Parthenon of Sophocles and Euripides, a Greek Shylock pleads, "Hath not a Jew eyes?" -while halfway round the world, black-jeaned Australian troupers tour the outback by bus, with a crown and a sword or two as their props...
...envenomed Coriolanus ended hanging head downward, like the dead, degraded Mussolini. Moscow has staged Hamlet as an army plot against the King, with Ophelia a court whore who played the mad scene drunk. In Manhattan a group of feminists staged an all-female Lear, and a Polish actor played Shylock as a fat, wisecracking Broadway type. At Stratford, Ont., Tyrone Guthrie mounted a brilliant, modern-dress All's Well That Ends Well in which the almost Ibsenite heroine became a waifish debutante and the play's "Florentine widow" turned into a wonderful old madam catering to occupation troops...
Alarcon's hero is an impossibly noble, handsome and athletic young caballero named Manuel who is thwarted in his desire to marry Soledad, the daughter of the town moneylender. This pinch-souled Shylock, whose exactions drove Manuel's father to his death, not only blocks Man uel's marriage but informs him that part of his father's huge debt is still unpaid. In the best Andalusian tradition, Manuel leaves town to seek his fortune, vowing to return, pay the debt, marry Soledad - and throttle any man who has looked...
There must be at least half as many ways to play Shylock as to play Hamlet, and most of them have been tried. Max Adrian gave us an unsympathetic Shylock--bitter, gloating, sadistic. Adrian is constitutionally incapable of doing a slipshod job; and this was a notable performance. Morris Carnovsky's unsurpassable portrayal last summer was an extraordinarily complex one; and it was no reflection on Adrian if he could not match it. Adrian's Shylock was simpler and more straightforward, and wholly consistent. And he adopted a faster tempo than most actors, avoiding exaggeration and the temptation to make...