Word: absurdist
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TIME MARCHES ON--and, in Harold Pinter's world, sometimes retreats. Pinter, after the fashion of most absurdist playwrights, delights in distorting and playing with time. And John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman is a novel of time--a modern narrator looking through a modern window at a Victorian story...
...town butcher (Joseph Leon) sweeps dirt off his porch into his house. Told to lower her voice, the wife (Mary Louise Wilson) of an eye doctor (Harold Gould) scrunches toward the floor. Occasionally, Simon abandons these hoary vaudeville turns for a flash of absurdist humor. The doctor's daughter (Pamela Reed), adorable as she is dumb, is asked what her favorite color is and replies, "Yellow. . . because it doesn't stick to your fingers so much." Her mother mutters: "I think she's wrong. I think it's blue...
Malle animates his vision of a contemporary Gomorrah with an intelligent deployment of detail and hovering shots of inanimate scenes. Some of his ironic directorial comments are almost absurdist: After mob punks kill Joe for stealing their coke, his estranged wife Sally (Susan Sarandon) is left to dispose of the body. When she arrives at the hospital to take a look, there's a gala ceremony to christen its new "Frank Sinatra wing," and right down the hall from Joe's corpse peacock-plumed dancers are kicking their feet while a blow-dried singer (Robert Goulet) croons. "I'm glad...
...were plenty of hints, but no real answer, as the Met staged its first new production of a season shortened by labor disputes. It was a trio of French works, with the umbrella title of Parade. The idea of presenting Satie's slight ballet Parade, Poulenc's absurdist opera buffa Les Mamelles de Tirésias and Ravel's L'Enfant et les Sortilèges came from Met Production Adviser John Dexter. The common theme was not World War I (though with effort all the pieces can be connected to it) but the devices...
...vaulting ambitions, her untempered will, her vulnerable femininity and her invincible Catholicism? Or will he move us by limming the last pathetic hours of a woman at the mercy of a woman who knows no mercy, Elizabeth I? Neither. Hildesheimer believes that history is an obscene irony, an absurdist fable signifying nothing. His prelates, earls, doctors, ladies in waiting and greedy hangers-on vary so little from the monarch that they are all like cards in a stacked deck...