Above the Crowd in England
Gerald
Barry is director general of the Festival of Britain which opens this
month with a service in St. Paul's Cathedral attended by Their Majesties
the King and Queen. Five years ago Mr. Barry, then editor of the News
Chronicle, conceived and proposed the idea for the, island-wide
summer-long, all-out jubilee. Since then he has worked ceaselessly with
the Arts Council of Great Britain which has commissioned new sculpture,
music, painting, ballet and opera. Up and down the land, in Ireland,
Scotland and Wales, as well as in England, he has enlisted artists,
artisans, industrialists, scientists, designers and the rank-and-file
Britisher in making the Festival a memorable "living record of a nation
at work and at play."
Photo by PAUL RADKAI
·
Several years back twenty-four-year-old Kenneth Tynan, drama critic and
boy wonder of the English theatre, was one of the conspicuous figures
at Oxford. Cadaverous and lanky, with pale long hair, he was an
undergraduate whirlwind of precocious naughtiness and real achievement.
Since graduating to London he has produced scores of professional shows,
including Othello with Gordon Heath and Man of the World with Roger
Livesey. Tynan himself will be the Player King in Alec Guinness' Hamlet
this summer. He was recently married to Elaine Dundy, a young American
actress whose love message is scrawled in lipstick on the mirror above
his head.
· Peter Brook, another glittering product of the "Ouds" (nickname of the Oxford dramatic society), has been called the "grand old enfant terrible of the British stage." Kenneth Tynan, in his He That Plays the King, a biting, witty, highly personal book about London performances and people, says of Brook that "one feels he has never traveled anywhere on foot or on buses, but is wrapped up in silk and carried." A mandarinlike little man, he is still in his early thirties, has had astounding acclaim as a producer-director. Blessed with a flawless sense of decor and timing, he had his first success at Stratford-on-Avon in 1946, went on to such triumphs as his production of Salome at Covent Garden, Huis Clos and his delectably gossamer staging of Ring Round the Moon. He will direct John Gielgud in A Winter's Tale during the Festival season.
· Irish-born Joyce Cary, whose writing has a full-bodied vitality of portraiture and narrative reminiscent of the nineteenth-century novelists, has an unmistakably Celtic wit and charm. The Horse's Mouth, his first novel to capture a large American audience, is an account of the engagingly disreputable painter Gulley Jimson and harks back to Cary's own early life as an artist. Later he fought in the Boer War and was for years a chief "Pooh-Bah of State" in Nigeria. A Fearful Joy, his most recent novel to be published here, tells the characteristically Cary tale of Tabitha, who leaves her lover a score of times in the course of fifty years, returns to him incessantly to escape from boredom. After a lecture tour of the United States, Mr. Cary is now back at home in Oxford near his brood of grown sons. An intensely musical family, all the Carys are better-than-amateur performers, often get together for virtuoso concerts at home.
· Peter Brook, another glittering product of the "Ouds" (nickname of the Oxford dramatic society), has been called the "grand old enfant terrible of the British stage." Kenneth Tynan, in his He That Plays the King, a biting, witty, highly personal book about London performances and people, says of Brook that "one feels he has never traveled anywhere on foot or on buses, but is wrapped up in silk and carried." A mandarinlike little man, he is still in his early thirties, has had astounding acclaim as a producer-director. Blessed with a flawless sense of decor and timing, he had his first success at Stratford-on-Avon in 1946, went on to such triumphs as his production of Salome at Covent Garden, Huis Clos and his delectably gossamer staging of Ring Round the Moon. He will direct John Gielgud in A Winter's Tale during the Festival season.
· Irish-born Joyce Cary, whose writing has a full-bodied vitality of portraiture and narrative reminiscent of the nineteenth-century novelists, has an unmistakably Celtic wit and charm. The Horse's Mouth, his first novel to capture a large American audience, is an account of the engagingly disreputable painter Gulley Jimson and harks back to Cary's own early life as an artist. Later he fought in the Boer War and was for years a chief "Pooh-Bah of State" in Nigeria. A Fearful Joy, his most recent novel to be published here, tells the characteristically Cary tale of Tabitha, who leaves her lover a score of times in the course of fifty years, returns to him incessantly to escape from boredom. After a lecture tour of the United States, Mr. Cary is now back at home in Oxford near his brood of grown sons. An intensely musical family, all the Carys are better-than-amateur performers, often get together for virtuoso concerts at home.
Photos by BILL BRANDT
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