This superb production evokes a strange friendship. It is a friendship of letters. A museum curator, a secluded nun and an irreverent satirist would not expect to be likely pals in a social setting, but give them the separation of letters and they evidently remained friends for nigh on fifty years between them. A lesson for those on todays internet who do not seems to be able to remain friends for more than a day at at time.
The tele-play cleverly places the actors around one another as they recite their written words, yet there is rarely any confusion in the viewers mind as to exactly what is going on. A long sequence of a fully-naked woman in an extended imagined image of George Bernard Shaw's "The Adventures of Black Girl in Her Search for God" seems incongruous but perhaps it serves to point up the shock of the nun, albeit her indignation is at Shaws blasphemy rather than any innocent nudism. This falling-out of two of the friends is counter-pointed by the most moving sequence of the play, when Shaw delivers to Dame Laurentia, two pieces of quartz he had picked off the ground in Jerusalem that had no doubt been part of the rock that Jesus himself must have walked upon.
It has to be said that McGoohan capers the most entertainingly as the whimsically wise GBS, but Gielgud is deliberately spare as Cockerell, the bedrock of the trio, whilst Ms. Hiller depicts a satisfaction as holy as it is wholly beyond modern comprehension. This is as fine a piece of simple Playing as you will find anywhere.
The tele-play cleverly places the actors around one another as they recite their written words, yet there is rarely any confusion in the viewers mind as to exactly what is going on. A long sequence of a fully-naked woman in an extended imagined image of George Bernard Shaw's "The Adventures of Black Girl in Her Search for God" seems incongruous but perhaps it serves to point up the shock of the nun, albeit her indignation is at Shaws blasphemy rather than any innocent nudism. This falling-out of two of the friends is counter-pointed by the most moving sequence of the play, when Shaw delivers to Dame Laurentia, two pieces of quartz he had picked off the ground in Jerusalem that had no doubt been part of the rock that Jesus himself must have walked upon.
It has to be said that McGoohan capers the most entertainingly as the whimsically wise GBS, but Gielgud is deliberately spare as Cockerell, the bedrock of the trio, whilst Ms. Hiller depicts a satisfaction as holy as it is wholly beyond modern comprehension. This is as fine a piece of simple Playing as you will find anywhere.