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1 out of 2 people found the following comment useful:-
A Spritely World, 6 January 2004
Author:
Christopher Mulrooney from Los Angeles
The dramatic device of letting Joseph tell his troubles to Potiphar
amplifies the latter's role to fit the conception of a workaday Egypt
visited by foreign traders such as the Hebrews whose patriarch is Jacob.
It's the several dimensions of the story brought into play like galleons in
a naumachia that give it dramatic interest, and most strikingly the Egyptian
court, ruled by a strange unwonted Pharaoh not sober and rational like his
steward Potiphar, but rather attuned to the spritely world of the gods and
their communications, of which his dreams are an example revealed by Joseph
(who is another, Pharaoh divines).
Joseph is seen as the type of Christ, which is just the sort of reading
calculated to raise the backhanded hackles of Professor Bloom, who
humorously rails against it in a collection of Bible essays, and who
recently (in much the same spirit, I fancy) regaled the world with
Shakspeare as inventor of the human personality, thus ousting Giotto from
pride of place in the aesthete's pantheon. There is enough refined thinking
here to be going on with, and for the rest, I do not understand the
objection.
As Joseph's brothers are making ready to depart from Egypt with their asses
heavy laden with grain, a search is made for the golden chalice one of them
is supposed to have stolen. The bags of grain are ripped open, the chalice
is found, the brothers are hauled in, and a much lightened ass calmly
munches the grain spilled out on the ground.
For an American television director, Roger Young is surprisingly adept in
the British stage tradition exemplified by Don Taylor's Oedipus At Colonus
with its unerring epiphanies. Ben Kingsley's Potiphar is the great spirit of
Egypt, grave and reasonable, a subtle mirror to his Moses. Lesley Ann Warren
as his wife is an inward construction along lines similar to her gangster's
wife in Victor/Victoria, but with an altogether different sort of refinement
simmering along the fringes of her courtly wig. Martin Landau's Jacob is
Jacob, the part is filled to the brim by a great actor who knows it. The
Australian dancer Paul Mercurio is a receptive Joseph, and his brothers are
perhaps intended to be so rowdy.
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