'Tamburlaine' On Broadway
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE Tamburlaine' On Broadway By Joseph T Shipley Tamburlaine the Great. By Christopher Marlowe. Presented by the Producers Theater: The Festival Company of Stratford, Canada. At the Winter...
...the bold hyperbole, as when he says to his beautiful queen, Fair is too foul an epithet for thee...
...And if the present production is "professional," so was that at Oxford in 1933...
...His pupil Shakespeare caught many ways from him: the wistful aspiration, as when Tamburlaine looks aheadIs it not passing brave to be a king And ride in triumph through Persepolis...
...Director Tyrone Guthrie, once of the Old Vic, and star Anthony Quayle of Stratford-on-Avon represent England...
...the sudden simplicity, as after Zenocrate dies, Nothing prevails, for she is dead, my lord...
...Fortunately for this production, Tamburlaine is a swirling drama of rhetoric and fury, of dashing armies and contending kings, of kings in chains, kings harnessed to a cart-of a Scythian shepherd risen to be monarch of the world, defying God, and snatched away by the one hand no mortal can escape...
...Fallen Angels...
...There were actually performances in the Colonies, then in the United States, in 1758, 1762, 1784 and 1799...
...A special folder listing invited guests included the Ambassadors to the U.S., Permanent Representatives at the UN, and Consuls General in New York of the Commonwealth lands from Australia and Pakistan to the Union of South Africa...
...but Anthony Quayle works manfully, on a fluid stage, to convey the untamed coursing of ambition's drive...
...Anthony Quayle makes him believable...
...He is a monarch proud of his power, ruthless, as ready to kill his own cowardly son as to torture an enemy king...
...but, as I shall indicate later, it would also have been more disappointed...
...At the Winter Garden...
...If Tamburlaine has the rant and rashness of youth, Noel Coward's Fallen Angels, come to Broadway the same week, has the memoried smirk of senescence...
...The present star is surrounded by a cast little better than the one we saw at Stratford, Connecticut last summer, which means not so good as some of our off-Broadway groups...
...It is a revival from the days when bathtub gin amused the fribbling set, when there seemed endless fun in a long act during which two women get drunk while awaiting a Frenchman with whom each has had a premarital affair and anticipates renewal...
...Marlowe on stage is a rare treat, to be welcomed by those who know the drama...
...In England, he says, save for the Old Vic production in 1951 with Donald Wolfit (who with Mr...
...the company of fifty-odd comes from Stratford, Canada...
...Marlowe was a great poet, the first to summon the appeals of rousing blank verse in the drama...
...Guthrie worked out the version here used), "there is no record of its haying been professionally produced since the 16th century...
...Presented by Charles Bowden and Richard Barr...
...Despite the clumsy handling of the battle scenes, we are stirred by the tyrant's challengeless power: we are appalled at the swath he cuts across the world...
...With banners, drapes, lights, colorful costumes, the stage presents a vivid, shifting spectacle...
...Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, Which into words no virtue can digest...
...The production is impressive in trappings and outward show, but in taste, sensitivity and simple artistry has been excelled by any of the productions of the Shakespearewrights at the Jan Hus House in New York...
...Through this Tamburlaine ranges, rages and roars...
...We can credit the fact that the leader of the Persian forces against him, after a single parley, swings devotedly to his side...
...In the naked thrust of fierce and fiery youth, Marlowe at 23 gave birth to the modern drama...
...In his program note, Tyrone Guthrie calls this the play's "first performance on the North American continent...
...No virtue can digest all the power of Tamburlaine...
...Or that superb passage that Shakespeare has only equaled, on the utmost limits of even the greatest art: If all the pens that ever poets held Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts...
...Perhaps an audience of drama lovers and students would have been more appropriate than the Governor, Mayor and Ambassadors...
...At the Playhouse...
...Marlowe caught him as he was alive in 1356, as he is today...
...The play, however, is more than she can sustain...
...Nancy Walker has many amusing tipsy tricks, with scarf, telephone wire, champagne glass, grapes...
...By Noel Coward...
...The playwright Nicholas Rowe made a version of Tamburlaine, which like the present one combines the two parts, in 1702...
...That Zenocrate, daughter of "Egyptia's" king, captured by Tamburlaine, becomes his proud, loving wife...
...Activity on the part of ANTA made an international occasion of the premiere of the current production of Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great...
Vol. 39 • February 1956 • No. 6
