Word: wits
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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...sense, sanity, shrewdness, the practical were the Shavian aims. He was neither a visionary nor a crank; but rather, in the manner of Swift-though far more successful in his mission to the English-a negotiator. By eloquent attack, irony, laughter, bounce, by the intrigue of words and a wit that cut everything to ribbons, in a prose so clear, fast and pure that it was like a charmer's music to the snake, Shaw hypnotized England. People became Socialists without knowing it even while they were denouncing Shaw as a mountebank and a playboy. Trotsky lamented that Shaw...
...Gloves Off. With the mayor's power in his hands, Impy managed to keep clanking effectively in his homemade shining armor. Last week he had the wit to jail hundreds of astoundingly puny hoodlums on the ground that they imperiled the sanctity of the polls. He announced that he had been forced to "take off the gloves." Tammany, he cried, was controlled, lock, stock & barrel, by Big Gambler Frank Costello, and Pecora was nothing but Costello's mouthpiece...
...straight drawing-room comedy, The Day After Tomorrow is anemic but agreeable. In its British way it manages to seem rather distinguished even when it is out at elbows. It has a nice languid urbanity, a pleasant suggestion of wit; and Melville Cooper is the suavest of performers playing the worldliest of peers. What does serious harm to the play is not its tenuous gaiety but its interminable romance. This not only makes for labored playwriting, but is never really in the true Lonsdale manner. Never was such real insouciance elbowed by such phony scruples; and never, for that matter...
After 56 years, the greater part of Mrs. Warren is utter deadwood-obsolete in method, lean on wit, smacking of 19th-century melodrama. In 1950, it is much more of a problem play for directors than for theatergoers. In general, the current production is weak. But the two crucial scenes between Mrs. Warren and her daughter ring out with a forthright vigor and vibrancy; and Mrs. Warren (Estelle Winwood) is played with decided style, her daughter (Louisa Horton) with fine sobriety. Twice Mrs. Warren's Profession booms like a great-bellied old clock, even if it otherwise runs painfully...
William B. van Lennep, curator of the Theatre Collection, said that "even his bad prose is better in wit and brilliance than the prose of almost any man writing in English today. That's how good...