Word: wyke
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...thriller follows the twisted interaction between Andrew Wyke (Caine), an aging, upper class detective-novel writer, and Milo Tindle (Law), a struggling young actor. After Wyke learns that Tindle is sleeping with his wife, Tindle arrives at Wyke’s remote home in the English countryside to demand divorce papers. A twisted night of humiliating mind games ensues...
...note is Caine’s role reversal—in the 1972 version, the young actor played Milo Tindle opposite Laurence Olivier, and both were nominated for Academy Awards. Caine, despite his accumulation of gray hair, excels at playing Wyke. In his old-school, distinctively British style, he effortlessly captures the old man’s eccentricity and nuances...
Smart theatergoers should probably blame the director for Andy Sellon's Milo Tindle. Sellon, clearly a talented actor, breezes into Wyke's mansion, his teeth gleaming obscenely, and proceeds to act as though he's been there on countless earlier occasions. Perhaps Sellon intends to play Tindle as a rather shallow gigolo, but he is not right for that interpretation--besides, Shaffer has taken great pains to show us a much more complex, sympathetic character, a young man understandably baffled by his host's odd behavior. Sellon's ultra-smooth Milo forgets to be incredulous. He improves in his later...
OBVIOUSLY, HOUSE productions cannot afford to spend much money on sets, but that does not excuse the lack of imaginative detail in Wyke's drawing-room. It was a clever idea to turn the Leverett House Old Library around on its axis, so to speak, converting the staircase that the audience descends into the theater into the staircase of Wyke's mansion. Beyond that, however, there is only a smallish fireplace, some dull furniture and a few half-hearted pokes at interesting knick-knacks. To convey Wyke's obsession with sophisticated games, Garry gives us a few propped-up commercial...
Worse are the lapses that occur in the course of the action. Sellon, for example, mispronounces the word "elan" as "uh-lan." And one of the funnier lines in the play--Wyke's remark of his wife, "She couldn't get Johann Strauss to waltz"--comes out, "She couldn't get Johann Strauss to waltz." That means, I suppose, that she couldn't get Johann Bach to waltz, either. Moreover, any self-respecting mystery buff can tell you that a "mashie-niblick," that jolly skull-splitter, is a five-iron; Bloomfield ludicrously brandishes a driver. All this may sound like...