Word: waxwork
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Waxwork by Peter Lovesey (Pantheon; $7.95). Lovesey's mysteries are set in late 19th century London, which in too many other authors' hands now seems exclusively Sherlockian. He writes with accurate verbal and social perception about the upper and lower reaches of Victorian sanctimony and contrivance. Waxwork, 41-year-old Lovesey's eighth novel, is at once charming, chilling and as convincing as if his tale had unfolded in the "Police Intelligence" column of April...
Golda's cabinet, generals, personal secretary, children, everybody except her artistically minded husband Morris (Gerald Hiken), seem to have been carted to the stage direct from Mme. Tussaud's. Unlike Mme. Tussaud's waxwork historical figures, these characters do have lines to say, but the play might move a little faster if they were mute...
...Some things The Book of Lists does not say about lists: a) they can be boring, silly and stupid (in 1976 visitors to Madame Tussaud's Waxwork Museum in London selected Twiggy as the most beautiful woman in the world); b) they are a poor key to civilized achievements ("Diets of 10 Famous People" includes Michelangelo and Billie Jean King); c) they lack plot development...
...small, the royal houses appear in many ways to be ingenious waxwork shows, as relevant to contemporary problems as alchemy or elephant worship. In the eyes of their critics, their appeal is to nostalgia rather than innovation, to complacency rather than initiative. Paul Johnson, biographer of Elizabeth I, argues that "the monarchy is the bastion of the class system. It is very difficult to divorce the monarchical system from the pyramid supporting it, and I suspect the pyramid itself is an extreme embarrassment in the economic and social sense...
...plumber comes to fix the hot water, she tells him. But he doesn't intend to scald himself to death, he argues. Non sequitur follows non sequitur. A trio of international jewel thieves arrives, but they also do quick-change sequences as Indian priests, complete with cobra and waxwork replicas of Captain Blood, Buffalo Bill and Marie Antoinette. As may be guessed, a good deal of this is just plain silly, but the wackiness is infectious, and at play's end Rupert is too pooped to take his own life...