I. The Rattigan Version
After his first dramatic success, The Winslow Boy, Terence Rattigan conceived a double bill of one-act plays in 1946. Producers dismissed the project, even Rattigan’s collaborator Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont. Actor John Gielgud agreed. “They’ve seen me in so much first rate stuff,” Gielgud asked Rattigan; “Do you really think they will like me in anything second rate?” Rattigan insisted he wasn’t “content writing a play to please an audience today, but to write a play that will be remembered in fifty years’ time.”
Ultimately, Rattigan paired a brooding character study, The Browning Version, with a light farce, Harlequinade. Entitled Playbill, the show was finally produced by Stephen Mitchell in September 1948, starring Eric Portman, and became a runaway hit. While Harlequinade faded into a footnote, the first half proved an instant classic. Harold Hobson wrote that “Mr. Portman’s playing and Mr. Rattigan’s writing...
After his first dramatic success, The Winslow Boy, Terence Rattigan conceived a double bill of one-act plays in 1946. Producers dismissed the project, even Rattigan’s collaborator Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont. Actor John Gielgud agreed. “They’ve seen me in so much first rate stuff,” Gielgud asked Rattigan; “Do you really think they will like me in anything second rate?” Rattigan insisted he wasn’t “content writing a play to please an audience today, but to write a play that will be remembered in fifty years’ time.”
Ultimately, Rattigan paired a brooding character study, The Browning Version, with a light farce, Harlequinade. Entitled Playbill, the show was finally produced by Stephen Mitchell in September 1948, starring Eric Portman, and became a runaway hit. While Harlequinade faded into a footnote, the first half proved an instant classic. Harold Hobson wrote that “Mr. Portman’s playing and Mr. Rattigan’s writing...
- 3/25/2015
- by Christopher Saunders
- SoundOnSight
Graceful stage actor who stood out in Doctor Who on TV and the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
In a long and distinguished career, the actor Aubrey Woods, who has died aged 85, covered the waterfront, from West End revues and musicals to TV series and films, most notably, perhaps, singing The Candy Man in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), starring Gene Wilder, and playing the Controller in the Day of the Daleks storyline in Doctor Who (1972).
Tall and well-favoured in grace and authority on the stage, he played Fagin in the musical Oliver! for three years, succeeding Ron Moody in the original 1960 production. He was equally in demand on BBC radio, writing and appearing in many plays, including his own adaptations of the Mapp and Lucia novels by Ef Benson (he was a vice-president of the Ef Benson society).
In the early part of his career he...
In a long and distinguished career, the actor Aubrey Woods, who has died aged 85, covered the waterfront, from West End revues and musicals to TV series and films, most notably, perhaps, singing The Candy Man in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), starring Gene Wilder, and playing the Controller in the Day of the Daleks storyline in Doctor Who (1972).
Tall and well-favoured in grace and authority on the stage, he played Fagin in the musical Oliver! for three years, succeeding Ron Moody in the original 1960 production. He was equally in demand on BBC radio, writing and appearing in many plays, including his own adaptations of the Mapp and Lucia novels by Ef Benson (he was a vice-president of the Ef Benson society).
In the early part of his career he...
- 5/14/2013
- by Michael Coveney
- The Guardian - Film News
Leading light of the British stage once seen as Gielgud's successor
John Neville, who has died aged 86, was a leading light of the Old Vic, the charismatic artistic director of the Nottingham Playhouse in the early 1960s and, after emigrating to Canada in 1972, a renowned leader of that country's theatre, notably at Stratford, Ontario. Tall, handsome and authoritative on the stage, and best known today, perhaps, for his sinister role as the Well-Manicured Man in The X-Files on television – was he on the side of good or evil? – he was often thought of as the natural successor to John Gielgud.
He found huge matinee-idol success early on, in the Gielgud roles of Hamlet and Richard II, though his patrician veneer and noble bearing could be easily discarded, as he showed to devastating effect in 1963, when he played Bill Naughton's Alfie at the Mermaid theatre, the role that became Michael Caine...
John Neville, who has died aged 86, was a leading light of the Old Vic, the charismatic artistic director of the Nottingham Playhouse in the early 1960s and, after emigrating to Canada in 1972, a renowned leader of that country's theatre, notably at Stratford, Ontario. Tall, handsome and authoritative on the stage, and best known today, perhaps, for his sinister role as the Well-Manicured Man in The X-Files on television – was he on the side of good or evil? – he was often thought of as the natural successor to John Gielgud.
He found huge matinee-idol success early on, in the Gielgud roles of Hamlet and Richard II, though his patrician veneer and noble bearing could be easily discarded, as he showed to devastating effect in 1963, when he played Bill Naughton's Alfie at the Mermaid theatre, the role that became Michael Caine...
- 11/22/2011
- by Michael Coveney
- The Guardian - Film News
John Neville, who has died at the age of 86, was "perhaps best known to American audiences for playing the title role in [Terry Gilliam's] The Adventures of Baron Munchausen as well as the Well-Manicured Man on The X-Files," suggests Sean O'Neal at the Av Club.
But he was also "a leading light of the Old Vic, the charismatic artistic director of the Nottingham Playhouse in the early 1960s and, after emigrating to Canada in 1972, a renowned leader of that country's theatre," writes Michael Coveney in the Guardian. "He found huge matinee-idol success early on, in the [John] Gielgud roles of Hamlet and Richard II, though his patrician veneer and noble bearing could be easily discarded, as he showed to devastating effect in 1963, when he played Bill Naughton's Alfie at the Mermaid theatre, the role that became Michael Caine's calling card on film. This performance, in which Neville graduated from juvenile lead...
But he was also "a leading light of the Old Vic, the charismatic artistic director of the Nottingham Playhouse in the early 1960s and, after emigrating to Canada in 1972, a renowned leader of that country's theatre," writes Michael Coveney in the Guardian. "He found huge matinee-idol success early on, in the [John] Gielgud roles of Hamlet and Richard II, though his patrician veneer and noble bearing could be easily discarded, as he showed to devastating effect in 1963, when he played Bill Naughton's Alfie at the Mermaid theatre, the role that became Michael Caine's calling card on film. This performance, in which Neville graduated from juvenile lead...
- 11/21/2011
- MUBI
Stop complaining about me giving away plots. I'm doing you a favour
Am I guilty of indecent exposure? I only ask because I am frequently accused by bloggers of revealing too much of a play's plot. I was even charged, rather weirdly I felt, with spoiling someone's enjoyment of the National theatre's Frankenstein. Given that Mary Shelley's novel has been around since 1818 and subject to countless adaptations, I'd have thought it highly unusual for anyone to attend the production in a state of total innocence. But, in general, the accusation raises fascinating questions about the technique of reviewing and the undue primacy we give to narrative suspense.
How much should a critic give away? With a whodunnit, we are obviously honour-bound not to reveal the ending. It's a convention the London Evening Standard's Milton Shulman once broke by concluding his review of a 1950s Agatha Christie thriller with the fatal words: "George did it.
Am I guilty of indecent exposure? I only ask because I am frequently accused by bloggers of revealing too much of a play's plot. I was even charged, rather weirdly I felt, with spoiling someone's enjoyment of the National theatre's Frankenstein. Given that Mary Shelley's novel has been around since 1818 and subject to countless adaptations, I'd have thought it highly unusual for anyone to attend the production in a state of total innocence. But, in general, the accusation raises fascinating questions about the technique of reviewing and the undue primacy we give to narrative suspense.
How much should a critic give away? With a whodunnit, we are obviously honour-bound not to reveal the ending. It's a convention the London Evening Standard's Milton Shulman once broke by concluding his review of a 1950s Agatha Christie thriller with the fatal words: "George did it.
- 4/4/2011
- by Michael Billington
- The Guardian - Film News
What makes a great critic? As we launch our third Young Critics' Competition, Guardian reviewers offer some expert advice – and reveal the writers who first inspired them
'A critic is more than a spectator' Michael Billington, theatre critic
I started reading reviews avidly in my teens. I'm still haunted by a phrase Harold Hobson used about Waiting for Godot in the Sunday Times: "If you have only 15 shillings left in the world, go and see Waiting for Godot. If you have 30 shillings, see it twice."
But the critic who really obsessed me, and most of my generation, was Hobson's great rival, Kenneth Tynan at the Observer. What Tynan showed is that criticism is principally about writing well. Open his collected reviews on any page and you find the phrases lock perfectly into place. Here's one example, from a 1956 review of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory: "Puffing on a cheroot,...
'A critic is more than a spectator' Michael Billington, theatre critic
I started reading reviews avidly in my teens. I'm still haunted by a phrase Harold Hobson used about Waiting for Godot in the Sunday Times: "If you have only 15 shillings left in the world, go and see Waiting for Godot. If you have 30 shillings, see it twice."
But the critic who really obsessed me, and most of my generation, was Hobson's great rival, Kenneth Tynan at the Observer. What Tynan showed is that criticism is principally about writing well. Open his collected reviews on any page and you find the phrases lock perfectly into place. Here's one example, from a 1956 review of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory: "Puffing on a cheroot,...
- 5/25/2010
- The Guardian - Film News
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