Word: cockney
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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ALFIE FINDS "THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD," by Charles Keeping (Watts; $3.95). From England comes one of the most beautifully illustrated books of the season-a simple story of a young cockney lad's adventure crossing the Thames by ferry on a foggy London afternoon. The paintings are brightly colored but muted by a haze that evokes the London atmosphere and a small boy's bewilderment...
...initial blast was the revelation that The Waste Land was originally titled He Do the Police in Different Voices. There is no clue to what Eliot meant by this unfortunate title. An off-the-cuff guess is that Eliot was alluding obscurely to cockney slang or to a vaudeville routine. Another speculation is that this was a working subtitle expressing Eliot's preoccupation with authority: one of the main theological theorems of The Waste Land is that God, who utters words like datta (give) and shantih (the peace that passes all understanding), speaks neither sense nor English but, like...
...inferiors. His delivery of the Queen Mab speech is a masterpiece of abstracted art. Teetering on madness, he spouts the words as if emerging from a lifelong nightmare. Zeffirelli, however, seems to have had better luck in casting youth than age. Pat Heywood's Nurse is a cockney caricature. And Milo O'Shea's Friar Laurence is a characterization lost somewhere in the middle distance, not deeply enough involved with the lovers nor sufficiently removed to act as a chorus of comment...
Marriage for young Victor's parents was a lifelong state of war in which the children were hostages. Father was a Yorkshire lad. Mother came from London-a "cheeky cockney girl." Temperamentally they were even farther apart. Father was an optimist, a dandy "walking in and out of jobs with the bumptiousness of a god." By the time Victor was twelve, the cab at the door had moved the Pritchetts 18 times. While Mother wept, Father filled those cabs with his bland bass voice...
Gary Byrne's Launcelot Gobbo, wide-eyed and Cockney, gets his laughs, by never pushing for them. His timing is impeccable. And while Byrne's polish doesn't always extend to the other comedians in the cast, there are no actively annoying performances. Whatever the minor actors lack in ability, they do not make up in pretentiousness. That in itself is a blessing these days...