Word: anguishes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Perhaps if Julian Lowenfeld as Serge could express overpowering impatience, anguish, and self-doubt (the three emotions the playwright relies on), we might take the shaky underpinnings of the play on faith. But though Lowenfeld is intermittently believable, he has an unfortunate habit of substituting decibels for modulations in expression and timbre. His loud rages are contrived rather than compelled: Gabriel, rocking silently in his chair, is the more effective emblem of the family's failure to communicate without hurting. As Monique says after Serge has thoughtlessly ignored her: "That's the first thing we should learn in life...
...makes the paper beneath it look brown. But almost everything else functions well in Richler's idiosyncratic, exuberant and welcome volume. What does not work is a steady insistence that humorists are a devalued species. In fact they enjoy unique privileges: they can mock the powerful, conceal anguish with a joke and enjoy an afterlife in the pages of anthologies. Small wonder that no one takes their complaint seriously. They themselves have made it laughable...
...expectations of discomfort, danger and the constant threat of death, he dares harbor only one decent hope: that in some unlikely 250th or 500th of a second his shutter will open and shut and almost by accident freeze an image that will make some human sense out of the anguish to which he is the world's paid witness...
...finds his greatest solace in having his own family. Affairs of business (the board of directors wants a new chairman) drive him away again, and in that journey his family is torn asunder, eclipsed, distanced from each other, only to come together years later after great hardship and anguish. The story provides a paradigm of family traumas: striking out alone, marriage, divorce, filial differences or just plain lack of time for each other. But ultimately, Pericles celebrates the nuclear family which endures and reunites against all odds and society's evils. All will live happily until the cycle of life...
...character as compelling as Depardieu's. His Robespierre is racked by doubts from the start jealous of Danton's popularity and power, yet willing to sacrifice all for the revolution. Pszonisk's careful acting and studied manmannarisms, as well as his fully convincing feverish fits of illness and anguish add wonderful dimensions to Robespierre. We are fully prepared for his pathetic final scene of self discovery as he realizes he has forsaken the goals of the revolution, and the words of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen echo in his head as a bitter condemnation...