Customer Reviews

Loitering With Intent: The Apprentice (Vol 2)

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I've admired O'Toole's acting for years, even had the privilege of seeing him live on stage in London, and I was interested in reading about how this great talent developed in the forge of traditional English theater training. But I couldn't get past page 40 of this book, which to me is almost unreadable, though I don't doubt there are people who will enjoy O'Toole's highly mannered style. A selection picked at random:

"Actor, author, audience, a trinity of indispensibles in the one heart one soul one body of a living playhouse. To be sure, cunning entrepreneur, a well-woven wig, a spangle shift, a glim properly spotted, consonance of setting and a muscular flyman, these and suchlike elements can bring ornament into our arena but don't confuse confection with practical pudding nor the fine spectacle of Mother Courage going one way while the set goes another, to be any more than a bright trick, a welcome and distractionary flapdoodle for a customer paying witness to our business of providing bare boards and a passion; our beginning and our end."

I can certainly hear O'Toole speaking these words, and they would be fit lines to be delivered by his lunatic character in "The Ruling Class". There, the long-winded, absurdist diatibes were wonderfully rambling and out of proportion to the subject matter at hand, which gave them great comic effect. Here, it gets tiresome after 20 pages or so, and you just wish O'Toole would get to the point, at least every once in a while. While this type of verbal embroidery may have some entertainment value in its own right, in a purported autobiography it was frustratingly oblique and just got in the way.

Peter O'Toole continues recounting his early years in the second volume of his biography. It has a slightly different style than the first volume (The Child), but is still extremely enjoyable. Highly recommended.