“Shop fascinated her, because she knew that most men were interesting only when they were talking it. As long as one hadn’t heard it all that one fatal time too often.”
In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review a webcast from Philadelphia of Coriolanus. Here’s an excerpt.
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“Coriolanus,” Shakespeare’s most explicitly political play, has largely failed to hold the American stage. It has been mounted on Broadway only once, by the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project in 1938, and I’ve reviewed just three productions in the past 18 years, most recently in Central Park in 2019. At first glance, this makes no sense. “ Coriolanus ” is a truly great work of theatrical art, one that T.S. Eliot thought better than “Hamlet,” and the plot, which pits the title character, an unabashedly proud patrician, against the common folk, easily lends itself to updating. Why, then, is it not done more often? Could it be because modern, democratically minded audiences are ill at ease with casting such a man as a hero and placing him at the heart of the action?
Whatever the reason, “Coriolanus” is a masterpiece all the same. Hence it is a delight to report that Philadelphia’s Lantern Theater Company is webcasting a broadcast-quality archival video of a live performance of a small-scale 12-actor 2017 production—one that is, like the similarly scaled Lantern staging of “The Tempest” that I reviewed in this space last month, outstanding in every way….
“He’s writing a paper that contradicts all old Lambard’s conclusions, and I’m helping by toning down his adjectives and putting in deprecatory footnotes. I mean, Lambard may be a perverse old idiot, but it’s more dignified not to say so in so many words. A bland and deadly courtesy is more devastating, don’t you think?
“To slave, to devote oneself, to have the highest imaginable sense of duty—these were excellent things, things of great merit. Merit—solid worth: it was unavailing against the sudden flash and bang, the inexplicable manifestation of talent. People did not easily forgive it that to you, not to them, had the gift been given.”
One of the books that I brought along with me to read was Some Buried Caesar, the sixth of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels, published in 1939. In it Archie Goodwin makes the following remark about Lily Rowan, his on-again-off-again girlfriend: “I was wondering which would be more satisfactory, to slap her and then kiss her, or to kiss her and then slap her.”
I must have read the book a dozen times over the years, but never until now had that line caught my eye. Suddenly a coin dropped in my head and I remembered another line…
