Word: wyke
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Andrew Wyke (Laurence Olivier) is a wealthy member of the English gentry. He is also the author of a dozen novels about the aristocratic investigator St. John Lord Merridew and an obsessive games player whose home looks like a cross between Pollock's Toy Museum and a penny arcade. Milo Tindle (Michael Caine), a London hairdresser whose parents were Italian and-worse yet-Jewish, is the lover of Wyke's estranged wife. He comes by Wyke's stately home one afternoon to discuss a divorce. Wyke instead presses him into an intricate plot to defraud an insurance...
Michael Allinson largely supports the play in his lead role as the successful mystery writer Andrew Wyke. Allinson struts around the stage like a long-legged bird secure on its own rocky turf, waving his arms and laughing from his belly while populating his imagination with his ace detective St. John Lord Merridew and a host of artful villains. Wyke's sixteenth century country house, the play's only set, is filled with bizarre paraphernalia. Among its pillars, arches, and cluttered bookcases sits a paper-mache automaton with a toothy smile. It laughs uproariously when Wyke activates it after each...
...Wyke has the opportunity to actualize a macabre mastery when he invites Milo Tindle the lover of his wife Marguerite, to his isolated house late one evening. Wyke convinces Tindle that his modest income as a travel agent--best known for 'Tindle's Tours to Jamaica"--will not keep Marguerite living in the style to which she is accustomed. He persuades Tindle to steal a cache of jewels worth 100.000 pounds hidden in the cellar. Tindle will keep the tiresome Marguerite permanently, and Wyke will collect the insurance. Together they plan the artificial robbery, carefully obeying Wyke's insistence that...
...setting is the study of an English country house, the home of Andrew Wyke (Anthony Quayle), a successful mystery writer. Into the room comes Milo Tindle (Keith Baxter), a travel agent. Tindle has been having a surreptitious affair with Wyke's wife. After a swift courtesy drink has been poured, Wyke makes Tindle blink by saying, "I understand you want to marry my wife." "Well, yes," gulps Tindle, "with your permission, of course," and a duel to the death begins between...
...Englishwith terms like fair play and a sporting chanceis cant in Shaffer's view. It masks some bloody-minded bigotry and is no sounder a guide to the British national character than the ritualized tea ceremony is to that of the Japanese. Wyke is very pukka. Tindle is half Italian with a half-Jewish father. Wyke can be loftily amusing about this ("Some of my best friends are half-Jews"), but he can also spit with rage ("a wop, a yid, a not-one-of-me face"). This is a seething ethnic confrontation...