Wingate of
Israel, Wingate of Ethiopia, remembered by Major-General Wingate running the
Burma campaign, where no resistance is available to him.
Lawrence is “a
distant cousin” with recognizable features.
The black-and-white
film camera on location merges with battle footage, the color television camera
(which grades into black-and-white in a culminating scene) gives abstracted
theatrical views on a sound stage.
The Biblical
citations are given an inspired understanding, notably Job 40:14.
The
Tale of Beatrix Potter
A well-brought-up
young girl with a knack and a love of the Lake District, a talented young lady,
brilliant even.
The circumstances
of her life and her famous books (like Virginia Woolf and Lord Byron, she
published herself to begin with, having in her case been rejected per the
regular form).
North Country
gone soft in the South with plenty of money, her family is described so from a
certain point of view. The adversities resemble those of Emily Dickinson, who
did not write for children and only incidentally published and did not sell “like
hotcakes”.
Quartermaine’s
Terms
The life and
death of a novel, stillborn even in extract, constitute the terms of
Quartermaine’s existence.
Although there is
a good deal of criticism within the play, directed at philistines and wankers such
as Henry Windscape, who finds in Lang’s M a sympathetic portrayal of a
sex murderer and in Renoir’s La Règle du jeu a cultured and humane
evening, the pointed tragedy is that of the artist manqué and not so
much for himself as for something else.
Species of
criticism are altogether satirized as well, the muse as literal mistress, the
great past as Philology Professor at Cambridge and one’s mother, that sort of
thing.
The various
impedimenta raise a comic horde of inventions impeccably performed by a great
cast.