Word: swifts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Swift & Valiant. Between wars, the company expanded still more by swallowing up Armstrong-Whitworth, one of Britain's leading manufacturers of engineering equipment, went into a whole line of heavy machine tools. For its heavy military business in the '30s, Vickers was tagged a "merchant of death." But in World War II, its fabled Spitfire (935,000 sorties by 1945) helped win the Battle of Britain, and its slab-sided Wellington bomber supplied the R.A.F.'s first counterpunch...
...military business to slightly under 50%. Chairman Weeks will keep it that way, ready for hot or cold war, spreading his bets over a variety of products in every division. Planes are no exception. In addition to its civilian Viscount, Vickers is also busy making its supersonic jet Supermarine Swift for the R.A.F., though bugs have slowed production. Its huge, four-jet Vickers Valiant is Britain's first long-range A-bomber to hit the production line. And to back up its short-range Viscount in the battle for airline supremacy, Vickers designers are at work on the Vickers...
Central to the play, of course, is the character of Swift himself. In a series of flashbacks, his friends in turn recall his malevolence from seven points of view the seven deadly sins. In each kaleidoscopic event, they are searching for the one clue that will explain his cal nature. At the same time, however, the play is more than a search for the last place in a jig-saw puzzle. Johnson has much to say about the tendency of every man to see in others his own greatest flaw; about the difficulty of re-creating the image...
Though several performers are unequal to the intensity required by the final act, for the most part the actors handle their dual roles with case. Unfortunately, the weakest member is Swift himself, played by William Morris Hunt. His role demands a constantly shifting personality (since swift was a different being to each of his associates) but at the same time as underlying continuity. Hunt supplies only the later, combining a tendency to talk too fast with tedious, satiric inflections of his voice...
...feminine leads, played by Bronia Sielewicz and Leslie Cass, seem considerably more at case on the stage. As rivals for swift's as Vanessa, is the emotional woman, quite ready to display her feelings; Miss Siclewicz, as Stella, creates the picture of the persecuted wife, quite proud of her own suffering. Other members of the cast could be singled out for varying degrees of competency. Catherine Huntington, for instance, contributes a fine monologue in the last act, as she reads to an insane Doctor swift. And Edward Finnegan is suitably foolish as the pompous Dr. Berkley...