Word: guidebooks
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...anything could make King Charles look good, it is the second production, Village Wooing -an unimaginative, and rather pointless tale about a thoroughly boring shop-girl's efforts to snare a pompous, Oxford-educated guidebook writer. In the end she succeeds, but no one, including Shaw, really cares. The play is just a vehicle for him to get in a few anti-American one liners, and express his male chauvinism more thoroughly than in his other plays...
...characters in Village Wooing are both well played. Natalie Lombard as the vacuous showgirl gives a good rendering of a cardboard role, and Martin Andrucki is sufficiently pompous as the guidebook writer. The acting in Fables, on the other hand, is an almost unmitigated disaster. Delia Sang gave a good performance in the first and third fables, but almost everybody else was uniformly awful. As bad as the script was, there were places, like the fourth fable, where the acting made it worse. But by then, no one gave a damn...
During her year in Germany, Diana made the turn away from affluence that so often marks the contemporary young. She preferred a Pension to a luxury hotel, a bicycle to a taxicab. On a trip with her father, she carried a Michelin guidebook because, he recalled, she "didn't want to go to any of those places, she wanted to go to places unknown...
Burma's building is shaped like a royal catamaran barge, Hawaii's like a volcano, the Ivory Coast's like elephant tusks. Even the tiny Persian Gulf sheikdom of Abu Dhabi has a pavilion-because, the Expo guidebook notes, it "hopes to gain new friends in the world by taking part." Japanese Architect Kenzo Tange, in charge of overall planning, claims that he likes the clashing effects. The only building that really angers him, he says, is a traditional seven-story pagoda erected by Japan's Furukawa conglomerate...
Oddly enough, Ardery is editor of HSA's 1970 edition of Let's Go To Europe, Gage edited the HSA Caribbean guidebook...