Word: tanners
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...text of the two-act play was adapted by Jerome Kilty '49 from the four decades of correspondence between Shaw and Mrs. Campbell, the celebrated British actress (nee Beatrice Stella Tanner). Many of their letters were published five years ago, but much of the material for this play has never been published, having been presented to Kilty by a friend who smuggled it out of France in 1940 at the behest of Mrs. Campbell, who was then on her deathbed and wanted the letters preserved...
Barry Morse as the iconoclastic John Tanner plays with deft versatility which succeeds in both the comic scenes and the more serious Don Juan in Hell interlude. Opposite Morse is Nancy Wickwire who sparkles as Tanner's impish, if unwanted, suitor. As the sentimental slush Octavius Robinson, Michael Higgins is handsome, winsome, and properly Victorian...
...Booke as the arch-brigand Mendoza (also the Devil in the Don Juan scene). Cavada Humphrey turned in an adequate performance as the misunderstood Violet Robinson, as did Robert Brustein and Thomas Hill as her husband and father-in-law respectively. I particularly enjoyed John Wynne-Evans as Straker, Tanner's Cockney chauffeur...
William D. Roberts has provided the play with highly effective colonnade settings which, with alternations, serve as a study, an English park, a Spanish moor, and a hacienda. The grass in front of the stage, moreover, makes a perfect roadway for the introduction of Tanner's early-model automobile...
...issue is complicated in the case of the artist-man who Tanner, or at least Don Juan, is. When such a person, possessing Shaw's enigmatic "Life Force," encounters the mother-woman, conflict is intensified because the artist is unwilling to submit to domesticity. A third twist is developed as the mother-woman also turns out to be an artist-mother-woman, which Anne Whitefield is. Thus the sexual trapping is extended to encompass broad questions of artistic self-realization in the face of domestic morality and social mores...