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DWIGHT MACDONALD
the obvious reality of obvious unreality-but when he tries to
be
serious, as at the final curtain, he fails. Although
The Caretaker
has been playing to full houses for months and
is
the one play
every one says you must see, and although its three actors are
excellent, I thought it a pastiche of Beckett and Ionesco and am not
surprised that it has been ill-received in Paris. So one might expect
the citizens of Newcastle to react to the import of coal, and inferior
coal at that.
Billy Liar
isn't a play at all but rather a series of epi–
sodes in the fantasy life of a young layabout. It
is
funny and moving
because of the delicate and inspired pantomiming of Albert Finney
in
the title role; he also played the lead in the
Saturday Night
film
and the things director Reisz didn't get out of him! The spirit of
Chaplin hovered over
Billy Liar;
it was Jack Oakie's ghost
in
Saturday Night.
The most popular Shakespeare production the Old Vic has
put on in years is Franco Zeffirelli's
Romeo and Juliet.
For once,
the public is right. Mr. Zeffirelli, who was brought from Italy
specially to stage the show, almost persuaded me that the modem
theater can be as important an art form as the movies. Ever since I
saw,
circa
1926, Basil Sidney's plain-clothes
Hamlet,
and, ten years
later, Orson Welles'
Julius Caesar,
I have thought the only way to
do Shakespeare is in modern dress. Those trench coats and tuxedos,
revolvers and cigarettes, far from being obtrusive (after the first
ten minutes) make it possible to actually
hear
the lines undistracted
by
all
those cloaks and halberds. But now Mr. Zeffirelli has per–
formed the miracle of using period decor without losing emotional
impact. His sets look like Italy as one knows it-chalky whites,
golden browns, severe greys, all sunbleached and real and lovely
and all not like something out of the Belasco warehouse;
his
cos–
tumes are at once harmonious and striking (how many styles of
hats, all expressive, men rejoiced in then!); they recall Uccello or
Gozzoli or Piero della Francesca rather than those nineteenth
century academic paintings of "Renaissance subjects" which are
usually the standard in Shakespearean productions.
The mystery of the season is the almost unanimous critical (and
word of mouth) enthusiasm for Michael MacLiammoir's one-man
recital,
The Importance of Being Oscar.
I found Mr. MacLiam–
moir's acting full of ham and the selections he gives from
Wilde
