Word: wits
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...said Madame de Parolignac, 'the tiresome creature! How carefully he tells you what everybody knows! How heavily he discusses what is not worth the trouble of being lightly mentioned! How witlessly he appropriates other people's wit! How he spoils what he steals! How he disgusts me! But he will not disgust me any more; it is enough to have to read a few pages by the archdeacon...
...charming English comedy. By no means the best of Mr. Milne's plays, Miss Kennedy and an able cast succeed in presenting it in a thoroughly entertaining manner. The disjointed plot that jumps from 1905 to 1930 without much continuity is not exactly exciting, but the author's gentle wit saves the play from becoming dull...
...long as Mr. Milne shows the past with a charmingly sentimental wit, he is on firm ground. He creates a strong sympathy for both of his leading characters that follows to the end of the play. When he sets David to orating on the Futility and Superficiality of the present he unfortunately fails to be convincing, or even amusing. Cocktails and smart talk might be thoroughly evil, but David is merely trite on the subject. Aside from this, there is only one major fault in the play, and that is a very flat end. The discovery of the police delivered...
...when he rolls up his sleeves to polish off Mr. Shaw, the famous Irish wit is made to look like a second rate effusion of Mr. Colley Cibber. Shaw, "has the brain of a juvenile Machiavelli superposed on a crybaby, philistine, middle-class soul... His brain is a half-inch layer of champagne poured over a bucket of Methodist near-beer." All Mr. De Casseres sees in Shaw is the mountebank who jigs for money, the Barnum of the drama, and nothing else. After reading this book the Shabian bubble is pierced...
...rather a repulsive and fretful brat." Its whims, according to Mr. Douglas, have doomed whatever pretenisons it may ever have had. England in particular is lost: her morals and manners, government and social institutions are all presented in the cold and keenly satiric light of the author's wit, a wit which will compare not unfavorably with the most malicious in history...