Word: wolfson
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...John Wolfson has constructed himself a fantasy, or more precisely, a cosmology, a huge private joke of a universe which he has thrown rather diffidently onto the Loeb experimental stage and asked an audience to enjoy. That is what strikes one first about Dr. Plantagenet, the sheer nerve of the play. Shaw's Back to Methuselah seems by contrast extraordinarily limited in scope...
...Wolfson's is an untidy universe wearily administered by a hierarchy of bureaucratic deities who survey the passing millennia with an admixture of cynicism and occasional sadistic delight. One of the functionaries is Plantagenet himself, who has programmed (in his own image) a self-operating machine which is called fate and which actually runs the earth. The "tertiary spiritual leader" nominally responsible for the earth, the official locally designated "God," appears here as Nathan Weltschmertz, an amiable, blundering fellow whose ambition to realize a personal utopia the machine continually frustrates...
...cosmologies have, by definition, their own sets of laws, and if one is to play the game of those who invent them on their own terms, one must be certain of exactly what these laws are. Here lies Wolfson's most irritating weakness, for he leaves his audience wondering about an enormous number of embarrassing technical matters. Why, after all, should lost souls produce a kind of "spiritual fallout"? Why should Nathan's metaphysics be so simple-minded that He cannot grasp the mechanics of good and evil on His earth? A lack of precision, a lack simply of detail...
...thousand harried executives. Plantagenet himself (Jere Whiting) seems determined to squeeze the juice from his lines; perpetually overcome by the cleverness of the dialogue he forgets that his significance lies not in his pose but in his machine. The grey hireling of the bureaucracy, the only real example of Wolfson's bitterness, is Erg, and regrettably Richard Black makes little of Erg. Like so many of the author's hesitating attempts at seriousness, this too is swept away...
...London's National Gallery at cost-the $392,000 that he had paid for it. Last week. Chancellor of the Exchequer Selwyn Lloyd announced that the National Gallery had raised the money (?40,000 from the treasury. ?100,000 from a foundation established by Chain Store Tycoon Isaac Wolfson), would buy the painting and display it permanently...