Word: golda
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...video technology monitored the principals in one of the planet's oldest enmities, as they performed for the world on their biblical home ground. The effect was eerie and complicated. Sometimes it produced a charming bathos, as when, under TV's smiling gaze, former Premier Golda Meir made fond Jewish grandmother's banter with Sadat about his new grandchild. In October 1973, the two had hurled armies at one another across the Sinai...
...which says that merely observing an event subtly alters it. Though both are experienced hams, Sadat and Begin knew (as televisionwise antiwar demonstrators of the '60s chanted) that "the whole world is watching." They both understood quite well the effect they were creating; they consciously used the medium. Golda Meir said later: "I am not sure whether in the end they will get the Nobel, but for certain both should get the Oscar." Yet the very nature of the event and the presence of the medium enlarged their behavior and their gestures-which in this case were gestures...
William Gibson has written this play on the accordion principle. So many flash backs, so much research, such fragmentary and confusing changes of locale have been squeezed together that the show unfolds in minute pleats rather than full-bodied scenes. The only substantial character in the play is Golda, played with centripetal force by Anne Bancroft...
...Golda's cabinet, generals, personal secretary, children, everybody except her artistically minded husband Morris (Gerald Hiken), seem to have been carted to the stage direct from Mme. Tussaud's. Unlike Mme. Tussaud's waxwork historical figures, these characters do have lines to say, but the play might move a little faster if they were mute...
...central action is the 1973 Yom Kippur war illustrated with film clips and battle noises that could be backdrops for any war at any time. A situation map might have been more helpful since the generals rush in every five or ten minutes asking Golda to choose from their conflicting advice as to what action to take on one front or another. More or less in the dark as to what is at stake, the average member of the audience feels as indecisive as Golda is made to seem...