Word: wits
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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What this production lacks in authorial wit, it compensates for by the concerted effort of cast and director. Except for a noticeable lack of energy in the Wilde offering and the shoddiness of all concerned in the Ibsen episode, the director, Clayton Koelb, manages to impose appropriate styles upon the four other parodies...
...Holy Eucharist. Yet if churchmen find it hard to describe a specifically Anglican theology, there is no doubting the reality of a modern Anglican theological manner: not the brain-numbing abstractionism of Germany's sages but an urbane lucidity spiced-à la C. S. Lewis-with literate Oxbridge wit...
...Italian Straw Hat now at the Loeb is a mixed haystack indeed. There is a great deal of chaff, but partially obscured in the loose straw are some fat kernels of wit and humor...
Bevan, a man of chivalrous gaiety and wit, was an intellectual dandy who relished the great world of London where he cut so fine a figure. He believed that he spoke for the underside of English life, but in the nature of things he had ceased to belong to it. "Bellinger Bolshevik," jeered Conservative Brendan Bracken as Bevan lolled in Lord Beaverbrook's drawing room. Unmoved, Bevan retorted that Beaver-brook's Bollinger was better champagne than he was offered at Bracken's house. A good riposte, but was this scene another of "the radiant ambiguities...
...well as the other two "Puritan" plays) he was poking fun at this genre and pulling the pedestal out from under the Romantic hero. The play is, then--if I may run the risk of Polonius' excessive categorization--an example of the didactic parody - melodrama. Brilliant comedy, epigrammatic wit, and hectic melodrama are here in abundance--but all in the service of solid intellectual ideas...