Word: soliloquys
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Only Michael Field, as Teddy, disappoints. His Teddy appears more as the absent-minded professor than the unruffled, pipe-smoking, detached observer Pinter intends. Thus his climactic soliloquy loses some of the force it might have had: "To see, to be able to see. You're just objects, you just move about. I can observe. You're lost in it. I won't be lost in it!" In Field's hands, the soliloquy becomes a childish lament, rather than a strong image of the intellectual detachment that Pinter despises...
...long as Brook remains faithful to the Shakespearean source, his dramatic choices are justifiable, but in his desire to render the play more coherent, he makes some changes that are unforgivable. Edmund is deprived of the rhetorical flourish with which Shakespeare endowed him, and the brilliant soliloquy of the first act ("This is the excellent foppery of the world...") is shortened and presented as part of a dialogue between Edmund and his brother. Jack McGowran's Fool is more than competent but too clearly the sage unrecognized. And, incomprehensibly, Brook leaves out two of the best lines in the play...
PETER LUKE'S Hadrian VII is a mediocre play with one outstanding central character. Structured like The Wizard of Oz, with a plot line that could have been borrowed from Putney Swope, this comic fantasy has more possibilites as soliloquy than as drama. Frederick William Rolfe, English recluse and neurotic who imagines himself Pope, has dreams more concrete than Dorothy's and ambitions no less earthshaking than Swope's. In treating the complex syndromes of Rolfe, playwright Luke has sidestepped the Putney-Swope assumption that what is sick must be funny: the Oz alternative (what is sick should be taken...
Laurence Harvey appears onstage to deliver Hamlet's soliloquy, then divests himself of princely raiment to a thundering strip-joint beat. As the bell sounds for the opening round of the world heavyweight boxing championship, the two burly contenders tiptoe to mid-ring and embrace with consummate passion! A new luxury liner turns out to be propelled by a gang of seminude galley slavettes, who bend to the oar under a whip cracked by everyone's favorite sado-maso slave queen, Raquel Welch...
...rarely. Art is powerful as long as it transcends the everyday. Without distorting reality it catapults in into a higher plane of sensation. Certain sublime moments in life can simulate the best art (or vice-versa). And certainly a divine fusing of sex and art, like Mobile Bloom's soliloquy, raises both to an incredibly exciting level...