Mary Burgan is a retired professor of English and association executive. Her column now runs weekly and she will be reviewing current-run shows. You can contact Mary by email.

I am not an Anglophile, and the PBS “Masterpiece Theatre” productions tend to make me yawn, so I went to see The King’s Speech with a load of skepticism. Not another bow to the British grip on American media drama from me. But I admired Colin Firth’s Oscar-nominated acting in last year’s A Single Man, and that memory lifted my expectations, though the sedate audience in the line to buy tickets at the E Street theater did make me anxious. (I am, by the way, a senior citizen myself).

Well, The King’s Speech is a good movie, and I think Colin Firth ought to get an Academy Award for his work in it. Firth is wonderful at rendering the repressed pain of ordinary men, and it’s clear that George VI was an ordinary man pressed into extraordinary service as King of England during the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich.

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