|
Betrayal, Harold Pinter's new play, is quite different from the main body of his work. It is not filled with the crossed monologues, portentous pauses, and insinuations of dark meanings that have come to form the Pinteresque style.
|
March 1980 |
Jack Richardson |
|
By now it should be well known that the much-anticipated and short-lived production of Richard III with Al Pacino in the title role was something of a disaster.
|
August 1979 |
Jack Richardson |
|
The protagonists of the two most successful dramas this season on Broadway, Whose Life Is It Anyway? and The Elephant Man, are a paralytic and a physical monster.
|
July 1979 |
Jack Richardson |
|
Since the late 50's, the English theater has been staging contemporary studies in class warfare. Spokesmen for those whom Max Beerbohm called "the unmentioned by Debrett" have by now accustomed even America ears to the social tensions of U and non-U dialogue.
|
April 1977 |
Jack Richardson |
|
A half-century has now passed since The Threepenny Opera was presented for the first time at the Schiffbauerdamm Theater in Berlin.
|
December 1976 |
Jack Richardson |
|
I went to Streamers with reluctance. The only other play by David Rabe that I'd previously seen, Sticks and Bones, had been an insufferably self-righteous exercise, a theatrically cliched study of our society and the Vietnam war that made the same arrogant generalizations about human life which it accused the average American of making.
|
July 1976 |
Jack Richardson |
|
Is Hamlet, as T. S. Eliot concluded, ultimately an artistic failure, a work of unintegrated parts and layers, of mismatched borrowings and techniques that leave its central character vainly searching for a significant action and is author for a dramatic event that will encompass the play's breadth of emotion and intelligence?
|
April 1976 |
Jack Richardson |
|
The flat of Algernon Moncrieff III on East Seventy-Third Street. The room has a faded elegance about it, as does Algernon. He is seated in his reading chair.
|
January 1976 |
Jack Richardson |
|
Free style and fixed categories, will and idea, mental geography and urban reality, odi et amo, the heart's reasons and the mind's imperatives, carnal compulsion and theoretical need-these are only a few of the antiheses that come to mind when one thinks back upon the books that Saul Bellow has written during the last three decades.
|
November 1975 |
Reviewed by Jack Richardson |
|
In his preface to the publication of a facsimile and transcript of the original drafts of The Waste Land, Ezra Pound described the manuscript's history of disappearance and secret acquisition as "pure Henry James."
|
August 1975 |
Jack Richardson |
|
At the Actors' Studio some years ago I listened to a discussion that had as its subject national styles of acting.
|
April 1975 |
Jack Richardson |
|
Each year the American theater season becomes less and less a result of native effort and more and more indebted to English ingenuity.
|
February 1975 |
Jack Richardson |
|
Les Fourberies de Scapin is not one of Moliere's great plays. Put together to keep his troupe employed while they waited for the scenery to be prepared for Psyche, the elaborate tragedy-ballet that Louis XIV had ordered, it is a hodgepodge of borrowings and outright thefts.
|
November 1974 |
Jack Richardson |
|
I wrote the above formula while I was a student of philosophy in Munich. The formula seemed at the moment of its conception to be a legitimate way of describing Nothing, Nullity, Nothingness, or any of the other theatrical concepts of total absence of matter and spirit, human or divine.
|
October 1974 |
Jack Richardson |
|
Since most of what is to follow will be a happy report, I will begin with a short diatribe so that I will be able to sustain my present theatrical enthusiasm without having to anticipate sour qualifications.
|
June 1974 |
Jack Richardson |
|
When G. B. Shaw retired as drama critic for the Saturday Review, he told his readers that he had come to feel, because of the narrow life led by a theater reviewer, like a goose with one foot nailed to the ground.
|
April 1974 |
Jack Richardson |
|
I first saw Long Day's Journey into Night in Paris. The time was the late 50's and some sort of international theater festival was being put on by the French government, the purpose of which was, I believe, to bring together productions that were currently on the stages of various countries and treat them to a month or so of multi-lingual repertory.
|
January 1974 |
Jack Richardson |
|
Since the publication, some thirty years ago, of "On Native Grounds," Alfred Kazin has been an important, working critic of American literature.
|
November 1973 |
Jack Richardson |
|
Change is certainly one of the facts of a critic's life. Having been enthralled and perplexed by art for many years, and having struggled to find a useful articulation of his enthusiasms and dislikes, he discovers one day that his pleasures have been restructured, that his intellectual energies are no longer nourished by works that once earned his joy and approval.
|
February 1973 |
Jack Richardson |
|
Strategy, the mode of human thought that seeks effects instead of causes, provided the real drama of the past summer.
|
October 1972 |
Jack Richardson |
|
In the jargon of our time, the word "relevant" has taken on a polemical connotation. In the cultural hagglings between those who idolize the present and themselves in it and those whose egos are coerced by tradition into modesty, relevance is almost always the line on which the battle is fixed.
|
April 1972 |
Jack Richardson |
|
It seems that Jesus Christ Superstar is not destined to be a landmark in the struggle of Christian revivalism.
|
December 1971 |
Jack Richardson |
|
Occasionally life provides complementary moments of experience, making it seem as though existence were not after all simply a collection of random events upon which only an unsettled mind would think of imposing order.
|
July 1971 |
Jack Richardson |
|
"A Midsummer Night's Dream" is one of the few plays by Shakespeare that appear to have no definite source.
|
April 1971 |
Jack Richardson |
|
There was once a handy mode of argument available to those who felt the need to be positive about the achievements of the American theater.
|
February 1971 |
Jack Richardson |
|
There was a picture of Noel Coward emerging from Buckingham Palace immediately after receiving his knighthood. He wore the proper morning-suit and, with gloved hands, leaned with the right amount of restrained aplomb upon a walking stick.
|
August 1970 |
Jack Richardson |
|
Ah, innocence! What would we Americans have for a subject without it? Now, of course, the mood these days is even more receptive than usual to the innocent.
|
March 1970 |
Jack Richardson |
|
The depressing thing about "Oh! Calcutta!" is that, for all its cool amusements and gritty determination to titillate, it ends only by proving that our society has a long way to go before it can produce and enjoy a truly licentious spectacle.
|
November 1969 |
Jack Richardson |
|
There were some three hundred of us milling about the stage of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, audience-actors all, shuffling here and there to our own choreography, creating our personal actions and dialogue.
|
May 1969 |
Jack Richardson |
|
"The Great White Hope," by Howard Sackler, is the sort of play for which all of us who battle for the theater's reputation should be grateful.
|
February 1969 |
Jack Richardson |
