Blarney and Bluster
VALENTINE, DEAN
On Stage BLARNEY AND BLUSTER BY DEAN VALENTINE Few would contend that A Touch of the Poet is Eugene O'Neill at his best (Long Day's Journey Into Night), or even at his considerable second best (A...
...So straitened are his circumstances that his wife, Nora, whom he despises, must serve as the inn's chambermaid and cook, and his daughter, Sara, as its waitress...
...The questions are never answered...
...transparent disguise...
...The chief apostate is Clark's wife, Lynn Redgrave...
...Soon a lawyer representing Harford's father comes to offer a substantial sum in return for a promise to prohibit the match...
...he has merely plunked it down on the Circle stage, whose immensity strains the audience's attention...
...For the play to succeed, then—to produce the necessary pity and terror—the lead actor must supply the character with what O'Neill did not: a self-deceit worthy of respect, as well as a nobility that can be tragically crushed by awakening from a dream of the past to the reality of a materialistic America...
...Indeed, these two movements were at the very top of the Shavian list of modern diseases...
...As for me, I recommend the Church, and suspect that Shaw would have sympathized, if not wholly agreed...
...The perpetrators of the sets and costumes are best forgotten...
...Only in the last few minutes of the final act, as a sanguinary Cornelius regresses to his lower, peasant self, does the actor achieve the largeness of character so sorely missing elsewhere...
...Paul Shyre's Cauchon lacks dignity and bearing...
...Joan had to listen to the commands of her voices, and the Inquisition just as surely had to condemn her to burn as a heretic...
...I had trouble hearing and seeing Robards recite his Byron...
...Henry Harford is too much with us...
...But unlike the protagonists of classical tragedy, Cornelius has few redeeming features...
...the servants, with the aid of a few compliant policemen, beat the blarney out of him...
...Captivating as this is, it robs the play of some of its inner drama, since Sara should be, above all, her father's daughter...
...Descending the stairs caparisoned in his major's uniform, he looks merely like a poseur, a man too small for his britches...
...A much happier note is struck by Barry Snider's bartender, whose mulish kindness is wholly believable...
...O'Neill created appalling women—generally saints or whores—and Nora is too loving and self-abnegating to elicit any response save discomfort...
...Tom Aldredge and Paul Sparer are senile as, respectively, the Archbishop and Inquisitor...
...Yet "Con" is rich enough to parade a fine mare about town and, as his friend observes, regards "the few Irish around here to be scum beneath his notice...
...The son of an Irish peasant who made a fortune, Cornelius Melody fought in the Napoleonic wars under Wellington, was discharged for philandering, emigrated to America with his family, and is now (the time is 1828) a lowly tavern keeper near Boston...
...Of all the playwright's works, A Touch of the Poet most resembles a buskin, dealing as it does with a hero whose immense hubris precipitates a fall...
...He considered the first as having led to World War 1 (to see how deeply the War affected him, one need only read Heatbreak House), and the second to greed and exploitation...
...But it does have what only O'Neill could create—a family that, in Kenneth Tynan's words, "is held together as much by hate as by love, a Strind-bergian household whose every member stares at the others with a hypnotized, horrified pity...
...It is what men do at their best, with good intentions, and what normal men and women find that they will and must do in spite of their intentions, that really concern us...
...Walker unfortunately lacks the requisite crude-ness of manner and voice...
...John Clark has directed without offering any evidence that he knows what the play is about...
...Still, it is virtually impossible not to favor one side over another...
...A usually distinguished actor, he plays Melody as a foppish buffoon...
...To move from the text of Saint Joan to its current incarnation at Circle in the Square is to go from the sublime to the ridiculous...
...The only passable performances belong to Philip Bosco, an appropriately oily Warwick, and Nicholas Hormann, whose Brother Martin Ladvenu was touching...
...It is not difficult to imagine him in medieval armor wielding a righteous sword against the dragons of this world...
...From the standpoint of 400 years, the Catholic excoriation of Joan and the social changes she heralded—nationalism and individualism—seems perfectly justified...
...Scene by scene, Saint Joan is like an extended series of lectures, a kind of droning college seminar labeled 'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Nationalism, 1412-1431.' " Nothing could be further from the truth, particularly from the truth contained by Saint Joan...
...In addition, he has cut lines here and there—gratuitously, since the work runs about as long as usual—including the most important in the piece ("Must then a Christ perish in every age to save those that have no imagination...
...Given the limitations of the part, Fitzgerald probably does as well as could be expected...
...There are," Shaw wrote in his preface, "no villains in the piece...
...In a pathetic attempt to sound like Boston gentry, she squeezes her lines through puckered lips, thereby emitting an unendurable noise that seldom resembles human speech...
...The look of the play, moreover, reminded me of those pictures in theater encyclopedias, where the actors seem to have been built onto their spots around the kitchen table...
...The play's greatness lies precisely in not taking sides, or rather taking both sides of an argument that has no resolution...
...On Stage BLARNEY AND BLUSTER BY DEAN VALENTINE Few would contend that A Touch of the Poet is Eugene O'Neill at his best (Long Day's Journey Into Night), or even at his considerable second best (A Moon for the Misbegotten...
...His timing and blocking are impeccable and the hint he provides of an incestuous undertow in Con and Sara's relationship is illuminating...
...Happily, this is relieved somewhat by Barry Edwards' set and lighting and Jane Greenwood's lively costumes...
...He never gets near Harford pere...
...But, poor man, he is more sinned against than sinning, for his cast delivers execrable performances...
...Although Milo O'Shea is negligible as Con's flunkey, Jamie Cregan— despite his thick black moustache— Betty Miller's Mrs...
...He is full of Romantic pretensions—living a pipe-dream of past glory, aristocratic heroism and sexual omnipotence...
...Cornelius becomes outraged, throws the barrister out and stalks to the millionaire's mansion to seek satisfaction...
...Had he simply told his cast to go out there and read, the result would have been much the same...
...He returns to the inn—and the bottle—a defeated man, which in O'Neill's dramatic vocabulary means a man without delusions...
...his ignominy is difficult to sympathize with, and the audience is tempted to wish this blustering fool good-riddance rather than good-night...
...Is his suffering family...
...Redgrave's movements are also mechanical, without any relation to the action around her, and she walks like a person who has traveled from China to Italy on the back of a horse...
...Kathryn Walker, however, transforms the complex Sara into a breathless, childish beauty...
...The medieval world had to die, doomed by its stagnation and crushing authoritarianism...
...and it does not have many digestible ideas...
...Often, in fact, it displays the author at his egregious worst...
...In Geraldine Fitzgerald's defense, it should be noted that the role of Nora is hardly a plum...
...What happened had to happen...
...Jose Quintero's direction does little to move the evening along...
...The desired effect, though, is not the right one, and it is difficult not to feel that Robards is hamming it up at the cost of a truly heroic Melody...
...As he admires himself in the faded mirror he recites these snooty lines from Byron's Childe Harold: "I have not loved the World, nor the World me;/I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bowed/To its idolatries a patient knee...
...Joseph Bova is too short in height and ability for Dunois, and Robert LuPone is such a flaky, whining Dauphin, I feared he would melt...
...When his daughter announces she plans to marry rich young Simon Harford, who is recuperating from an illness upstairs, Cornelius scoffs, accusing her, with some justice, of mercenary motives...
...Is Melody better off now...
...In our own day, we have watched nationalism end in mass-murder, and individualism degenerate into the alienated narcissism that is the shibboleth of the Aquarius generation...
...But I don't understand why he placed the mirror all the way to the left of the stage...
...Too long by half, the play is never content to make its points twice but insistently beats them again and again and again into the audience's head...
...Most of the cast fares worse...
...its language trips from high melodrama to lame Irish colloquialisms...
...Although one would have thought Eric Bentley's George Bernard Shaw: A Reconsideration (1947) had put an end to the notion of Shaw as a Fabian pedagogue using his characters as mouthpieces, we find T. E. Kalem writing these bon mots in a December issue of Time: "Joan the Maid is Shaw in...
...It pounds and scrapes against the listener's eardrums, threatening in an extended keen toward the end to smash them altogether...
...She takes a character full of passion, genius, robustness, and poetry, and turns her into a smarmy, strutting, obnoxious dolt...
...certainly he has not the trace of hero of the Battle of Talavara, the classy soldier decorated by Wellington...
...Her Joan must be seen not to be believed...
...Jason Robards, I am sad to report, is not up to the task...
...Thus, whereas A Touch of the Poet recalls Greek tragedy through its plot, Saint Joan does so through its principal theme—inexorable fate, or the Life Force, as Shaw liked to call it...
...He crumples up his fingers, rolls his eyeballs to denote a touch of the demonic, curls his lips, and sticks out his tongue...
...yet can we look back without at least a shred of regret that history pronounced Joan the winner...
...And that voice, that unbearable volubility...
...These gestures, it is true, frequently produce the desired effect: a con man whose lies and sarcasm overlay an infinite pool of disgust with the world...
Vol. 61 • January 1978 • No. 3
