Word: scripted
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There are paradoxes aplenty in Fry's beautiful script. His characters ask all the right burning questions: whether it is better to accept the frailty of human nature or commit oneself to abolishing original sin through death. Whether love and passionate commitment to ideals can evoke significant change in the ways of man and the universe. All these are woven into a complex sequence of events, including an imminent wedding, a witch-hunt, and the arrival of a self-proclaimed criminal. The confusion created by these events is hardly as noteworthy as the questions thereby inspired. Without the spark...
Pillinger staged this production as a "labor of love," but apparently his fixation upon the sound of the script blinded him to its potential for a spirited treatment. Fry's prose, though too densely written to be believable, is loaded with clever puns which are here denied the emphasis needed to make them funny. The director's love of the play also led him to slight other important elements such as consistent character development, blocking and technical competence. The set, for instance, suggests that the company started out with some good ideas but didn't have the time or ability...
...Lass that Loved the Sailor" below her station--propelled by Gilbert's jabs at pomp and middle-class mediocrity--still fills an evening. But it was the deliberate self-conscious irony that made something out of Pinafore's obviously inane plot--the hundreds of little jokes in the script that combine to take all the starch out of the Victorian stuffed shirt...
Almost every moment in the script rings false. Why do the lovers scrupulously avoid each other 363 days a year? For no reason other than to preserve the writer's one-set gimmick. Why do the adulterers profess so much affection for each other's spouse and kids? So that old-fashioned audiences won't be too threatened by the couple's yearly transgressions. Slade is a classic practitioner of the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too school of Broadway dramaturgy. He seems to be saying that a carefully circumscribed adultery will actually improve...
Then there is Goldman's script, which refuses to make up in wit what it lacks in thrills Goldman chooses instead to litter his dialogue with allegedly with-it references (from Steve Martin to the Four Seasons restaurant), as if sheer name drop ping might pass for sophistication...