Word: strachey
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Republican town of Ben Avon, a Pittsburgh suburb, by declaring himself a socialist. His father, a purchasing agent for a steel company, and his mother, a teacher, both thought the flirtation with socialism was crazy. "I read The Coming Struggle for Power, a Marxist analysis of capitalism by John Strachey," he recalled later. "It was powerful stuff and I thought it was probably true...
...unstoppable. He was appearing in an undergraduate production of Pirandello's Henry IV, for which he had also designed the sets and costumes, and it is typical of the man's combination of luck and manipulation that the play was agreeably reviewed in the Spectator and witnessed by Lytton Strachey. Wherever Beaton went, celebrity seemed to hover--or was he the one who contrived to be in the slipstream of the famous...
Even so, it is useful to have this work as a long-overdue antidote to Lytton Strachey's sneering, unfair attack in Queen Victoria (1921). Prince Francis Charles Augustus Albert Emmanuel of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was, for one thing, strikingly handsome--possessed of a "beautiful nose" and "fine teeth," as Victoria noted in 1836 when the two cousins, both 16, first met. He was a dutiful, romping father. He taught the art of the somersault. He played with kites. He enjoyed having nine children in 17 years almost as much as Victoria...
...from Virginia Woolf to Carrington's sailor-lover into throwaway lines. As a theatrical contrivance this works amusingly. But it is one thing to simplify, for dramatic convenience, the structure of historical lives and quite another to oversimplify their emotional tenor. In Talmage's hands, the brilliant Strachey becomes a fussy queen; the dangerously unstable Carrington, a ditsy pre-hippy. Like Noël Coward, Talmage seems to think the ideal relationship between a man and a woman is that of innocently playful and bantering siblings to whom heterosexuality is no more than one of nature...
...than that, so effective is Under the Ilex as a theater piece. Talmage has a genuine talent for witty dialogue, Charles Nelson Reilly has directed with an inventiveness that is only occasionally overenthusiastic, and the actors are near perfect. One suspects there is more gallantry in Prey's Strachey, more simple romanticism and humanity in Harris' Carrington than either history or the script invested them with. Be that as it may, one also suspects that in a theatrical climate where the domestication of homoexoticism for the middle-class market is a prime order of business, this play...