Best Acting Ever

I don't normally go in for this type of highbrow deal, I just taped it because it came from the Midnight Cowboy director, but this show is exceptional in every way (except for the ghastly lighting and videotape of this production).

This show is two plays and, as broadcast on This TV in L.A. with commercials, it was 90 minutes for the first act and one hour and nine minutes for the second act. As everyone says, each one is totally different, but set in the same place, and the second recycles actors from the first in totally different roles.

This story is the most wide ranging discussion of the human condition that I can imagine. With just a handful of characters sitting in a dining room and lobby of a hotel, they manage to cover class issues, educational snobbery, marriage, sexuality, politics, domestic violence, communism, age discrimination, crime and punishment, and many more topics. It is at once tender and horribly cruel.

Every actor in this is fantastic enough to make it worth watching even if there was no story there, but Julie Christie is not quite on par with the rest of the cast, even though she does a good job.