Word: virago
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...surrounded by Pip, the haughty Estella, the lawyer Jaggers, the convict Magwitch, Miss Havisham could be the kind of flamboyant character, drawn with simple, sharp lines, on which operas thrive. Mozart used a similar virago, the Queen of the Night, in The Magic Flute. But Pip, Estella and Jaggers (Magwitch is left out entirely) appear and disappear, little more than shadows crossing Miss Havisham's feverish brain...
Unpredictable Virago. Ivan's father, an impoverished dandy, died in 1834 when the boy was 16-possibly to get away from his wife. Turgenev's mother was a wealthy, unpredictable virago who alternately punished and indulged her serfs and sons. "Children brought up under a tyranny," observes Pritchett, "spoiled one moment and beaten the next are likely to be evasive and to lead a double life." Ivan, Mama's favorite, always existed on two planes: the imaginative and the real. On the first he succeeded; on the second he foundered for six decades...
...sketches are pretty wispy stuff, ranging from a government clerk sneezing on a general at a most inopportune moment to a dental student ecstatically extracting a tooth to a virago making life pluperfect hell for a gout-prone bank manager. The second half of the show is distinctly brighter and breezier than the first. The entire cast is not only exemplary, but extraordinarily versatile, and Christopher Plummer, as usual, provides superior acting with facile, enviable ease...
...evening is howlingly funny. Wallach has always possessed perfect comic pitch and he displays it again here. However, he lacks that certain panache which makes St. Pé a duelist with destiny rather than a Good Soldier Schweik taking fate's pratfalls. Jackson is an awesome virago who delivers her lines like bayonet thrusts...
...often as not, the New Woman was a masculine fantasy-Greta Garbo as a Soviet virago, titillatingly mannish yet secretly craving French perfume and Melvyn Douglas. Such, at least, was popular mythology-women, even in their supposed emancipation, have often been, as it were, prisoners of the male imagination. Always there was the secret, insistent vibration of sex: rebellion ends when Rhett Butler kicks down the door...