Poetry
Partridge, Dixie
the savages in the hills, as Kate calls her more unbuttoned neighbors, celebrate with dance and drink and animal sacrifice. This allies the homage to the pagan god Lugh with the African...
...In a profile in the New York Times Magazine (September 29), Friel suggests that the play is "about the necessity for paganism," but the thematic importance of all those dancing feet, on stage or simply described, gives way to the theatrical need to bathe the Mundy sisters ("those five brave Glenties women," Friel's mother and aunts, from whom the characters derive) in a retrospective embrace of memory...
...Even so, there is some residual charm to Gramps's trapping death up the tree so that he can stick around and protect his grandson from the clutches of his greedy, dogoody Aunt Demetria, and to the defeat/triumph of an ending in which the principals die happily...
...Memory omits and exaggerates, Williams says, because it "is seated predominantly in the heart...
...That is where Dancing in Lughnasa is seated, which is what touches audiences...
...And I can't seem to stop dancing to "Anything Goes...
...He is a pleasure to watch, but his Gramps is more a collection of actor's tricks than a real character...
...Only Teresa Wright as Granny is more character than actress playing a character...
...He twinkles, he grimaces, he hesitates slyly, he pauses naughtily...
...This allies the homage to the pagan god Lugh with the African festival of the first yam--three days of nonstop dancing by Father Jack's leper friends--which the priest describes so eloquently that he makes clear the distance he has moved from his Christian calling...
...Yet, audiences who take On Borrowed Time with a Mundy grain of salt may still find bits of it to their taste...
...The Gramps I remember fondly is Lionel Barrymore in the 1939 movie, and if there was ever an actor with more calculated ties and quirks than Barrymore I cannot recall him...
...GERALD WEALES 6 December 1991:719...
...k ot long after the remembered Mundy summer, in the unreal real world of Broadway, an amiably sentimental comedy opened...
...I could do without much of the grown Michael's commentary (the adult explainer is the curse of the memory play), but while the Mundy sisters are on stage I am as susceptible as the next person...
...Scott lives in Barrymore's neighborhood...
...George C. Scott, who directed the production, was presumably enticed by the juicy role of Gramps...
...I assume, however, that it was not these tepid virtues that led to the revival at the Circle in the Square...
...Poor Nathan Lane, who lacks the built-in suavity of Sir Cedric Hardwicke, the movie's Mr...
...Brink, is given occasional outbursts--hardly what one would expect of Osborn's death figure--but he and the rest of the cartoon characters are upstaged by Gramps...
...The Mundy sisters loved American music, but there is a comic toughness to them that makes me doubt that they would have responded well to On Borrowed Time, had a road company come through Ballybeg...
...Paul Osborn's On Borrowed Time, an adaptation of Lawrence E. Watkin's novel, lacks the bite of his Morning's at Seven, and it creaks a little these days as it sets up coming scenes and sets them up again and still again as though audiences were not very bright...
...and certainly Kate, so appalled by the paganizing of Father Jack, would not have approved of the secular softness of an afterlife where "the woodbine twineth...
Vol. 118 • December 1991 • No. 21
