The Stage
Liston, William T.
has led Christianity to a new depth of self-understanding? Some of these, and others, might be established by argument; hardly by name-calling. Paul Larose's is the most helpful letter. His...
...that I saw the company perform on tour in New York's Winter Garden Theater in 1956 with no sense of fatigue or of overly great length...
...For once, there was something new under the sun...
...She lighted up aspects of the role, and therefore of the whole play, of which a lesser actress wouldn't have been aware...
...And like everyone else affiliated with the company, he respects his audience and makes few concessions to it: when you come to Stratford you are expected to be capable of witnessing unadulterated Shakespeare...
...Miss Smith and Miss Tyzack have two of these roles, and 2 September 1977:564 the resultant production is very strong...
...Topography reveals part of this reality, and so do statistics...
...His agreement on the issue of power pleases me...
...Continuity of tradition extends beyond the actors...
...A piece or two of furniture carried on stage localizes the scene quickly and economically, so that Richard H1, like last year's Antony and Cleopatra, seems to speed by in three and a half hours.,I'm sure that the influence of her stage and staging bore strongly on a production of Marlowe's Tamburlaine (Parts I and II, 10 acts...
...Domini Blythe, Strindberg's Miss Julie this year, is typical of many others: though only in her second year at Stratford, and with a host of secondary roles to her credit in both years, she is nevertheless an established leading actress...
...I am grateful to Rev...
...daele battlefield became a quagmire in which not only hundreds of men but even mules were drowned, guns disappeared, and to dig a trench was merely to create a canal," writes Robert Graves...
...They play leading roles, of course, but they also take minor roles...
...If of the latter, would not we all reject it...
...Most of these monuments, which, too, could be gathered under the stated purpose of the Ypres League, are perhaps literary: the countless poems actually written in the trenches (England, wrote Edmund Blunden, half a century later, "was not after all a nation of shopkeepers but of poets"), and the vast outpouring of memoirs and novels in the decade or so, generally, beginning about 1929...
...Others of this rank in just the past couple of years have been Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy last year and Kathleen Widdoes a season earlier...
...MARK TAYLOR The Face of S a t t l e JOHN KEEGAN Viking, $10.95 The F i r s t World War in Fiction HOLGAR KLEIN, ED...
...Now that liberals dominate discussion, it seems wise to pay them the compliment of special skepticism...
...This season's Richard I11 has such a large number of roles that all seem relatively minor except for the title role...
...That the charge of antinomianism is not a red herring is indicated not only by the spirit of the age, but also by Mr...
...What has made this festival so successful is that these people become part of the ensemble, not just stars superimposed on a summer stock company...
...The writers struggled, not only in England, of course, to press a highly refractory reality into the service of art...
...for ours is an open Church and, seeing only-poorly, we need to~ test the spirit as best we can through sustained argument...
...Bruce Swerdfager...
...The success of the company is due to many factors, of course...
...The charism has, therefore, in unbroken tradition been perceived as one fitting to males but not to females, not out of any inherent virtue in males, but out of God's good freedom to utter the message he chose to utter...
...WILLIAM T. LISTON (William T. Liston is a member o/the English department at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana...
...He was also at Stratford in 1975 but missed last season while starring in a national tour of Equus which earned him the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award for best actor...
...never a sustained decline...
...and that the voice from the trenches spoke for every soldier of the industrial age...
...Were we to wait for perfect justice before we recognize law, the wait would be long...
...So were William Needles and Douglas Rain, though they have not been present every season...
...that I MARK TAYLOR teaches in the English Department at Manhattan College...
...It is this respect for excellence that has made the Stratford Festival so popular...
...What is clear in all productions, these that have been cited, and others, is that the stars are members of the ensemble: that they have worked and rehearsed and meshed until each cast has achieved a seamless production...
...hence, one part of the problem for them was to discover the means of extending this tradition so as to accommodate the materials of the new reality...
...To be a male is to be a different soft of sign, symbol, and representative than to be a female...
...Richard Monette and Marti Maraden, Romeo and Juliet, have been present for seven and four years, respectively...
...issued this year as an Oxford paperback) Paul Fussell contributed greatly to our understanding of the voice from the trenches...
...Whether or not the English poets, memoralists and novelists were all particularly gifted writers, they were, as Fussell demonstrates, surpassingly educated in their own literary tradition...
...Margaret Tyzack, in her first season at Stratford, is well known to watchers of Masterpiece Theatre on PBS for her roles in The Forsyte Saga and Cousin Bette, and Nicholas Pennell, in his sixth season, is similarly familiar to Forsyte Saga viewers...
...The Passchen...
...The plays he directs himself are always imaginative in conception and execution, and though sometimes a bit idiosyncratic, always grounded in a thorough and detailed knowledge of the texts...
...I saw her play an excellent Cleopatra at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, in the summer of 1975...
...His message, not ours...
...and his points about "charism" and "essence" are confused...
...In his Songs of Innocence Blake wrote, "Such such were the joys," and in his nonsense poem "Cold are the Crabs" Edward Lear wrote (it is the intentionally uncompleted last line), "Such such is life...
...To b e a priest is to be a sign, to perform a symbolic function, and in particular to represent Jesus Christ incarnate...
...Martha Henry, playing Helena in All's Well and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, first came in 1962 and has missed only three seasons in that span...
...MICHAEL NOVAK SUCCESS AT STRATFOBD THE STAGE When the Stratford Festival Theatre was founded twenty-five years ago, 68,000 people saw Alec Guinness and Irene Worth play the leading roles in Richard III and Ali's Well That Ends Well...
...If it is of the former, I embrace it...
...In this silver jubilee season (lasting until 15 October) more than half a million people will come to the pleasant Ontario town and will see these same two plays and eight others, six of them by Shakespeare...
...The problem," he wrote, "for the writer trying to describe elements of the Great War was its utter incredibility, and thus its incommunicability in its own terms...
...Nor are these all...
...he misses the point on gnosticism, as did other writers...
...Louis Applebaum provided the music for the first production of Ali's Well and for this season's also, as well as for other plays during the quarter century...
...Tanya Moiseiwitsch, who designed both productions, has not been present in Stratford for several of the intervening seasons, but her influence is pervasive, for, with Tyrone Guthrie, the original director, she designed the Festival stage, an open, thrust stage, a marvelous and flexible instrument for dramatizing Shakespeare rapidly...
...He focused on the literature of the war as "an attempt to make some sense of the war in relation to inherited tradition...
...Another answer is literary echo, also used ironically...
...As artistic director since 1975 Robin Phillips has enormous influence on the quality of production...
...who eventually became general manager, left the company last year after twenty-four seasons...
...Thus, David Jones uses the materials of Arthurian legend and Welsh folklore in In Parenthesis, and Edmund Blunden, that "harmless young shepherd in a soldier's coat," develops his memoir Understones of War, though ironically, in the context of literary pastoral...
...Larose's swift leap to "no law at all," a spiritualist and antinomian move if ever there was one...
...Brian Bedford appears in three of these, being especially good as the villainous Richard III...
...In addition to these players who have international reputations, and who are somewhat transient, there is a solid corps of actors and actresses who return year after year, giving the company great continuity...
...Barnes & Noble, $18.50 I none of the refinements of military technique or perfections of weapons achieved by science since 1918 had effectively worsened the predicament of the individual who found himself in the killing zone...
...Related to this procedure is that of Frederic Manning in Her Privates We, which not only affixes Shakespearean epigraphs to each chapter and models whole episodes on scenes in Shakespeare's plays, but even in its structure--moving from the unpleasant reality of the front lines to the illusory peace of a rear area and once again to the front, where Manning's hero Bourne dies--resembles the tripartite development of most Shakespearean comedy...
...The Church has amply understood that women can be deacons, not priests, because priesthood adds something special beyond "sharing in the same state as clerics"--including a special identification with Jesus Christ, beyond even that experienced in the other sacraments...
...This year, for example, Maggie Smith, who was also a member of the company last summer, is appearing in Richard III, a Midsummer Night's Dream, ~ As You Like It, Molnar's The Guardsman, and Coward's Hay Fever...
...William Hurt, for instance, who plays the King of France in Ali's Well this year, was a mem~ber of the company when Guinness played the role in 1953...
...but Charles Hamilton Sorley (killed in 1915 at the Battle of Loos) began a sonnet, "Such, such is Death...
...Names of this sort will always draw an audience, and undoubtedly that has been one of their chief functions ever since Guinness and Worth performed in a tent in 1953...
...One solution to this problem lay in the employment of traditional literary modes to convey the experience of the Western Front...
...I must disagree with him that "any further argumentation is not only futile and fatuous and presumptuous...
...on gift...
...In last summer's production of the play (which I did not see) Maggie Smith was cast as Mistress Overdone, a Bawd, an even more minor role...
...The most obvious and superficial of these is that there are a~ways at least a couple of actors of the stature and reputation of Alec Guinness and Irene Worth...
...When conservatives dominated public dialogue to gain some balance, one needed to lean in a liberal direction...
...In the 1975 production of Measure jot Measure, for example, Kathleen Widdoes played Mariana...
...I I n 1920 Field Marshal Viscount John French of Ypres founded the Ypres League in order that the English might forever have "a record of that service for themselves and their descendants and belong to the comradeship of those who understand and remember all that Ypres means in suffering and endurance...
...In his justly celebrated The Great War and Modern Memory (1975...
...A glance at box office figures shows that attendance has grown steadily from that first summer with occasional lapses...
...Barry MacGregor, in the dual roles of Theseus and Oberon (and also company manager) has been at Stratford for twelve years...
...The festival has been remarkably successful...
...2 Septembr 1977:566...
...To east her in such a minor role seemed wasteful until she appeared...
...when she did, the extravagance was justified...
...They share a mother/son relationship in Ali's Well and Ibsen's Ghosts, and Miss Tyzack has the role of the virago Queen Margaret in Richard IH while Pennell is Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet...
...NOVELS OR WAR NOVELS...
...Alphonse J. Gesing for seeing that the basic question is whether the spirit behind the move to ordain women is of the Holy Spirit or of the spirit of the age...
...The Ypres League was but one of many monuments constructed by survivors of the Western Front--monuments to shared experience, fallen comrades and surreal horrors, but also efforts to transmit to those who had not fought something of what the trenches had been like, or to understand them, or to place blame for them...
...Another 400,000 casualties...
...Trying to explain "the eternal quality contained in the best literature of the First World War," John Keegan now asks, movingly: "Was it . . . that the public had recognized that from the literature of the First World War, from the story of the Somme, it had learnt as much as it ever would about what modern war could do to men, and perceived that some limit of what human beings could and could not stand on the battlefield had at last been reached...
...In addition, priesthood is based neither on law nor on rights, but...
...Like every other director, he cuts and rearranges slightly, and he interpolates a bit Commonweal: 565 of stage business, but the rationale is always clear, even if not immediately...
Vol. 104 • September 1977 • No. 18
