Word: wyke
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Andrew Wyke (rhymes with "like," but in this production incorrectly pronounced "wick"), the mystery novelist who invites his wife's lover to his home for a battle of wits Sam Bloomfield has an acceptable British accent and a smooth, resonant voice. But his characterization is superficial--a lot of surface bluster with little going on underneath. He has no spontaneity; the words sound as though he has said them too many times before, and he takes no delight in his own verbal cleverness. It is not a bad performance, but Wyke is a tantalizing character--a child clinging stubbornly...
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...
...Many people say his true greatness was in the theater, but Olivier has rendered many memorable film performances: Hamlet, Henry, Richard, Othello, Astrov, Strindberg's Captain, and to a lesser, though often equally delightful extent, Heathcliff, Archie Rice in The Entertainer, Graham Weir in Term of Trial and Andrew Wyke in Sleuth. Perhaps, many hope, he will return to the stage someday, if not to undertake a more mature Lear (he did it in '46 at the Old Vic), then perhaps to portray Prospero. There are those of us who would swim the Atlantic for a chance to see that...