BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: THEATER

Low moments in theatre criticism
	
When Agatha Christie’s play SPIDER’S WEB opened 
at the Savoy Theatre in London (1954), one of 
the disgruntled critics told his readers which 
character in the play was the murderer!
*** 

ON LIGHTING DESIGN

“Great lighting onstage has an unplaceable emotional 
effect. You feel it in its swelling or ebbing before 
you get a chance to think. Sometimes light’s power 
is totally belated: I realized how much certain 
arrangements of exposure and shadow have touched 
me only when, days later, I recover them in memory.”

Vinson Cunningham. “Lighting the Way,” in The
New Yorker (July 4, 2022)

**

IMPROVING KING LEAR:  NAHUM TATE IN 1681

          “He produced a happy-ending Lear that held 
the stage from the late seventeenth until the early 
nineteenth century. Even Dr. Johnson found Shakespeare’s
 ending almost unendurable (though he retained Shakespeare’s  text for his own edition of the plays).In the Tate revision, 
the story ends in a way that justice, and especially poetic justice, seems to require: Lear gets his kingdom back and then resigns, and Cordelia marries Edgar, Gloucester’s good son . (JAMES)   Shapiro read us some of the fustian Tate: “My Edgar, Oh!” –“Truth and Vertue shall at last succeed,.” Everyone laughed.

David Denby. Great Books (New York: Simon and Schuster,2005)

‘ Lillian Braithwaite, who was playing opposite Coward
 in The Vortex at the time was able to get the better
 of (JAMES) Agate in an exchange they had some years 
later at a theatrical reception. ‘My dear Lillian, 
I have long wanted too tell you that in my opinion 
you are the second best actress in London,’ said the 
then critic of the Sunday Times.
   “’Thank you so much,’ replied Miss Braithwaite.
 “I shall cherish that –coming from the second 
best dramatic critic.’’

Richard Brier. Coward & Company, (London: Robson
Books, 19870.


Dos Passos in the Theatre
 	
Although John Dos Passos is well-known for his work 
as a novelist, he also wrote a play – “The Moon is 
a Gong.”  When his play opened on Broadway in 1926,
 Percy Hammond, critic for the New York Herald-Tribune,
 wrote:

	“(DOS PASSOS) detonated against everything
	from garbage to the radio and left us at
	the end of his performance deafened and
	confused.  His play was of the unsettled
	type, all delirious and harum-scarum.  It’s
	screws were loose….”

*** 

HIGH BUTTON  SHOES  (1947)

“The plot , as in most musicals, is negligible. 
In this case it involved the arrival of a couple 
of mountebanks  (Phil Silvers and Joey Faye) in
 New Brunswick, Nj, where they sell some 
underwater real estate and try to fix the 1913 
Princeton –Rutgers football  game. The scores
 of the stage match (Rutgers 40, Princeton 37)
 provoked Princeton undergraduates to come to
 New York and enliven opening-night festivities 
with a prankish picket lines. The actual score 
of the 1913 game was Princeton 14, Rutgers 3.”

NEWSWEEK (October 20, 1947)

**
CHEKHOV’S ADVICE 

“After the original rehearsals of The Seagull at 
the Moscow Art Theatre, Chekhov was approached by 
one of the actors who asked him how he should play 
his part. Chekhov replied, ‘As well as possible.’”
                        Stanley Price
PLAYS & PLAYERS (April 1970)

**

REVIEWING THE PLAY HOTEL ALIMONY

“Out of an inherent sense of decency I was tempted
 to ignore Hotel Alimony as though it had never
 happened. Reviewing it is a dirty job, but someone
 has to do it.”

     Burns Mantle

**
THE SERIOUS WORK OF THEATER

"I would say that there is something much bigger in
life and death than we have become aware of (or
adequately recorded) in our living and dying. And
further, to compound this shameless romanticism, I
would say that serious theatre is a search for that
something that is not yet successful but is still
going on."

Tennessee Williams. "Forward' to Sweet Bird of
Youth (New York: A Signet Book, 1959)
**
STAND IN or THE NIGHT I KISSED MIRANDA

As stand-in
I read all the parts,
As actors, actresses, & props

Came down with colds
Or called

In sick. No sooner did the news
Arrive but I flew

Down the aisle, prompt-book
In hand & took

My place upon the stage,
1st as savage

Caliban, or Ferdinand
Or Ariel, filling in &

Playing every role in turn,
Clowns, lords, kerns

& gallowglasses were all one
To me. High flown

Rhetoric brooded in the wings,
One scene a king

Mismatched, unbuckled
As lighting men called

Out their cues, then next
Some princess vexed

With love or overeating.
Couplets on my tongue

Timed the scenery into place,
The list of characters passed

Through my lips. I was them all.
If anyone were ill,

I was well, danced & capered,
Cut a jig, kissed & read

For empty seats, an empty
House –“Oh Lord, flee

To Agincourt before it is
Too late.” Alas, alas,

Hero & heroine were cursed,
Yet stood self-assured

Within the light & I
Rode home. Stand-in, fie
Upon it. Oh fie…..]


Louis Phillips