Word: devlin
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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...Bradley said that "King Lear" was too huge for the stage. He would presumably have applied this dictum to the stage of the Brattle Theatre Company. Yet that group, with the invaluable assistance of William Devlin, has managed to confine this great play within the limits of its stage. It has achieved that rarely attempted, even more rarely successful, feat a good production of Lear...
...Bedlam, sometimes an old man, sometimes a king above men-who is most closely connected with Nature. Therefore, if the play is to mean anything, it must have a Lear who can speak with Nature, pluck the infinite out of the false ceiling of the Brattle Theatre. William Devlin is this...
...stature of an expression of Nature; his "Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, and then no breath at all? over the corpse of Cordelia was pure pathos. In portraying the fall of Lear from king to disillusioned father, to madman, to dying, bereaved old man, Devlin combines the grandeur of the king and the weakness of the old man. He binds the magnificent curse of his miscreant daughter Generil ("Into her womb convey sterility"), and the moving vision of life in prison with Cordelia ("So we'll live and pray, and sing, and tell old tales...
...husband of one of apprentices at Brattle Hall is a friend and countryman of Mr. Devlin's and it was through him that our local players invited Devlin to appear. This will be his only appearance here, due to commitments in England and plans for taking "Murder in the Cathedral" to Rome for the Holy Year...
...people over at Brattle are understandably excited about this production, and at a rehearsal Sunday night some of them were moved to tears by Mr. Devlin's performance. This is surely the most ambitions local undertaking since the "Agamemnon" was given in Soldiers Field in 1906, and may prove to be the most momentous American Shakespearean production of the decade--Momentous not only in the appearance of William Devlin but in the ultimate "making" of the Brattle Hall group...