Theatre (Vintage International)

Rating:
Summary: Delightful.
Review: A photo from the set of Being Julia, the forthcoming film version with Annette Bening, led me to this book. Julia Lambert alleviates even the most claustrophobic subway ride with delicious English wit and melliflous sentences. You'll want to read some of the best lines out loud.

Rating:
Summary: Typical maugham
Review: Theatre -By W.Somerset Maugham

Theatre is a typical Maugham book.Maugham is a great story teller.Words,sentences and quotes simply flow from his pen as he created a personality and a story.As usual his book deals with human nature and their foibles and frailty.This book is about an actress who has reaches middle age and his happily married with a son.Up comes a friend of her son,who brazenly seduces her.The experience overwhelmes her and she begins to enjoy life without a trace of guilt.Maugham is able to penetrate the mind of the character and weave a wonderful tale.Good enjoyable reading .

Niraj Jain

Bombay ,India

Rating:
Summary: At its best, an Agatha Christie without the murder...
Review: This is a novel so relentlessly slight that one proceeds through it with the constant expectation that the *actual* novel might at any moment begin. The whole thing (some 300 pages in my edition) reads like a set-up for something substantial, a story in which the characters here engaged- an actress named Julia; her actor-manager husband Michael; their accountant Tom; their son Roger; and a small cast of lesser (and entirely one-dimensional) figures, down to and including a caricature Cockney maid- have something of import or significance to do, say to one another, or perhaps think. The closest we get, alas, is a brief period of introspection on Julia's part, prompted by an out-of-left-field observation from son Roger, in which she considers that it is possible that her life does not merely center around her acting, but has in fact itself *become* acting. And there we are.

If there were any particular consequences to or results from the heroine's several romantic intrigues (which substitute for a plot); if there were more about acting as such, or about the theater world of London between the wars; if the dialogue were wittily engaging, or if the narration were somehow less pedestrian (one's finger never once itches for the highlighter)--if any of this were the case, one could see why "Theatre" deserved a place, if perhaps a marginal one, in Maugham's much-praised oeuvre. But they aren't, so the question hangs fire: if that sizable body of work (including 20 novels) inspires blurbs like the one on the back of my Russian-reprint (with typos aplenty) edition-"Maugham's keen and observant eye, subtle irony and brilliant style made his books extremely popular all over the world."-how did "Theatre" find its way into the mix? Cheez Whiz, talk about irony! It's hard to imagine a better summary-- keen observations, subtlety, irony and brilliance-of the elements *missing* from "Theatre."

Granted, there are some diverting moments here and there, and just enough competent storytelling to keep the reader from tossing "Theatre" aside after a hundred pages. But at its best the novel still leaves one suspecting, as developments so adamantly refuse to take place and significance successfully escapes at every turn, that one has somehow picked up an Agatha Christie novel which never gets to the murder.

Put otherwise, there is probably a good short story in here dying to get out. And that, in effect, may already have happened-only the short story has emerged as a screenplay. A movie based on "Theatre", called "Being Julia" and starring Annette Benning, is apparently scheduled for release in 2004. While I'm not racing to reserve tickets for opening night, I can see how Hollywood might feel that a nicely filmable star vehicle/character study might come out of this novel- and indeed, might have a much better chance for success in its genre than the original did on the printed page.