Word: stuart
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Died. Stuart Cloete, 78, prolific South African writer of short stories, essays and more than 20 novels; of a heart attack; in Cape Town. Though he was born in Paris and educated in England, Cloete felt most at home in the land of his Boer ancestors. His first novel, The Turning Wheels, about pioneering Afrikaners, published in 1937, was a bestseller in Britain and the U.S. But it was banned for 37 years in South Africa, perhaps because it described interracial love affairs. Cloete was blunt in assessing the movement toward independence in black nations. "I had thought that...
...royalty so completely dominates Mary Stuart, it's because the performances of the male actors range from adequate to downright awful. David Moore is befittingly old and quavering as Shrewsbury, the adviser who was right from the start, and Keith Cornelius is convincing enough as Paulet, Mary's incorruptible jailor. After that, however, it's all downhill...
...Mary Stuart is a static, talky play, and Chapman has done little to disturb its stateliness. Keeping the pace slow, he instead relies on the dramatic excitement generated by his two leads to give the play momentum. It's a strategy that works well when the queens are soliloquizing or confronting each other, but inevitably breaks down when the men take over...
Like most Loeb productions, Mary Stuart is technically impressive--from the simple, stylized sets to Elizabeth's jewel-encrusted costumes to the eloquent lighting. The final scene--Elizabeth's last hurrah--is superbly staged: the lights dim on each of the queen's advisers as they leave her one by one, until she sits alone, framed by a spotlight on her proud, lonely face. The effect is magnificent...
During their confrontation outside the prison gates, Mary accuses Elizabeth of hiding her sins behind "the false show of a virtuous-seeming face." Mary Stuart's sins--its slow pace and weak male leads--are right out in the open, but they fail to obscure the queenly virtue which illuminates the show...