Word: edwardia
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Director Trevor Nunn, who can thread the needle's eye of nuance and possesses a searching eye for detail, has set the play in what the late Kenneth Tynan called "a timeless Edwardia." Helena, a kind of lady-in-waiting to the Countess of Rossillion (Peggy Ashcroft), burns with love for "a bright particular star," the countess's son Bertram. A physician's daughter, Helena follows Bertram to the Court of France and cures the mortally ill King (John Franklyn-Robbins...
...also over matched in the role, lacking Richard son's explosive charm and easy com mand. Under Edwin Sherin's impeccable direction, a dozen character sketches in depth are expertly rendered. The British accents are flawless and the set is hermetically sealed in a world of timeless Edwardia...
Admirable though it is, her work does not work, precisely because it is all work and no play. She gets little help. Andre Previn's score always misses, without ever swinging. Beaton's costumes are a slight modification of the timeless Edwardia that he prefers to inhabit, and scarcely reflect the spare Mondrian modern that is the mark of Chanel. Lerner's book manages to suggest a rough draft rather than a finished libretto. He must be somewhat chagrined that the biggest laugh of the evening comes when Hepburn spits out the short word for excrement...
Half a Sixpence, a musical adapted from H. G. Wells's novel Kipps, comes from that nostalgic era that Kenneth Tynan once called "timeless Edwardia" ?a period now thought to have been simple, stalwart, gracious, leisurely, and completely immune to the fretful complexities of modern life...
Behrman found him doodling caricatures of Balfour, Oscar Wilde and Henry James as if he inhabited a kind of sempiternal Edwardia. He also found him talking. Apart from copious quotations from Max's own writings and a generous sprinkling of his superlative caricatures, Portrait of Max is a graciously spliced tape recording of the twilight talk of a minor, but finely mannered, man of letters...