Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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Ross, by British Playwright Terence (Separate Tables) Rattigan, opened last week with Alec Guinness as Lawrence of Arabia. A complex, 16-scene production, the play reaches brilliantly, perhaps too slickly, into its legendary hero's mind, illuminating but never completely resolving the essential enigma: Was Lawrence the spectacular hero who inspired and led the Arabs in their World War I revolt against the Turks, or was he a lying, unstable charlatan...
With the alias John Hume Ross, Lawrence sought anonymity at the height of his fame (1922) by joining the R.A.F. as an ordinary airman (his later and more famous pseudonym was Shaw). Playwright Rattigan's account begins in the barracks, uses a series of flashbacks to go at the hero's question: "Oh, Ross. How did I become you?" As Guinness of Arabia, Sir Alec is at his subtle, suggestive best, and even the physical resemblance is striking. In his radicalism, there is more than a hint of the showoff; in his sophistication, a climber's cunning...
...Tenth Man. The girl is obviously psychotic, but Playwright Paddy Chayefsky-in a strikingly original play set in a Long Island synagogue-suggests that she might be possessed by a dybbuk, an evil spirit that has all but vanished from currency in the age of Freud...
Five Finger Exercise. One of the Broadway season's few well-written plays is the work of British Playwright Peter Shaffer, who nearly kills an outsider by shoving him into the deadly crossfire of a devastatingly ordinary and unhappy family...
...Prodigal. Using the legend of Orestes, 24-year-old Playwright Jack Richardson makes a mocking, modern statement and turns what could have been a dry academic exercise into a deeply written, fully fleshed work of theater...