Word: reaney
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Williams' story does contain some rib-a'd fun. "Come on, desiccated creeps," Reaney cries out in a with-it drinking club, "throw off your guilt, throw out your chests, you're English. Form up the squares, Kabul to Kandahar, Mad Mullahs, Pathans, Uhlans, Marshal Ney -stuff the lot of them, bloody foreigners, show them cold English steel." But his writing is marred by cliches of thought ("That was life, people dominated by people, dominating others in turn") and some awful puns ("Ezra Pounds while Ernest Humsaway...
...central figure, a paunchy, 37-year-old promoter of pop singers, is neither big enough to be a hero nor mean enough to be an antihero-it is simply a case of the protagonist as pudding (in this case, Yorkshire). Peter Reaney is as square as Trafalgar. He dangles from familiar hang-ups: a nagging wife whom he calls Her Malevolence, a job about which he feels guilty, and a loathing for the contemporary English way of life. His conversation is modishly cynical: "Take to the boats, lads, and let the women drown...
What about his power over women? Mostly in his mind. In one of Reaney's sexual fantasies, he is the only man in the Empire who escapes impotence from a fiendish dust unleashed by the Russians. An all-woman Cabinet appeals to him to fulfill his duties. "My greatest achievement," he recalls, "was to produce the goods for Britain 113 times in one week." But when the dreams end, Reaney is strictly a power failure. He attributes one blowout to the fact that the widow in the upstairs flat had bad breath. He talks a young singer...
...humor in Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector, with The Merry Wives of Windsor providing the Anglo-Saxon comedy. Richard 111, played by Alan Bates, represents a somewhat darker strain. On July 31, Christopher Plummer appears as Antony, with Zoe Caldwell as his Cleopatra. A new play, James Reaney's Colours in the Dark, debuts July...