Word: shavian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...rail, hooded figures threaten, before a ladylike Jolly goes North for further schooling. Beyond some vivid touches by Eartha Kitt, the play has small merit. It is so gagged up with breezy situations, crude stereotypes and comic characters that the racial angle, which might have breathed chill realism upon Shavian comedy, seems merely employed for effect. What is not Pygmalion about the play is tatterdemalion...
During the Thirty Years' War, a Krupp sold guns to Protestant and Catholic alike, and from that day to the end of World War II the family was rarely false to the Shavian armorer's creed. The blood-and-iron saga of Kruppdom, including its rise from the ashes of World Wars I and II, is an intrinsically fascinating story. Unfortunately the drama is often dulled by German-born Author Norbert Muhlen's drab style. But he livens his chronicle with a series of personality sketches of the lonely, driven eccentrics who lorded it over the steelworks...
Heartbreak House has always had its advocates as one of Shaw's most important plays. Certainly Shaw himself meant it to be important. A formidably long work, it had to do, Shaw announced, with "cultured, leisured Europe" before World War I: it was to be a sort of Shavian Cherry Orchard. Thus frankly symbolic, it portrays the kind of people, the ways of living and the states of mind that helped produce the 1914 war. Into the ship-shaped house of an aged English sea captain (Maurice Evans), himself the voice of a more high-mettled era, there troop...
...success: the four-week limited engagement of Jerome Kilty's Dear Liar had been sold out overnight. Based on the series of "wicked, wicked letters" that George Bernard Shaw exchanged over the years with Actress Stella (Mrs. Patrick) Campbell, the play crackled with the thrust and parry of Shavian wit neatly done in German. But for once G.B.S. himself was being upstaged by an even more powerful drawing card: famed Viennese Actress Elisabeth Bergner, 59, emerging from semiretirement to score the triumph of her career...
...script calls for dusk at this point, and Ben Edwards provides splendidly perceptible and atmospheric gloom to emphasize the foreboding mood. But the almost surreal quality of this passage, its combination of mystery and sublimity that survives the most dreary Shavian bathos when read with half an ear and half a soul, is turned by its current interpreters into a distracted pandering for tepid chuckles. Mr. Clurman has caused the weird chant to be accompanied by a jolly jig, and Maurice Evans delivers Shotover's curtain line with a phlegmy ingratiation that completely drains it of grandeur...