Word: antiheroically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...combined three basic elements: Chekhovian sensibility, with that playwright's rueful portrait of the hero as antihero; the Freudian irrational unconscious, with the wayward id buffeting the will-less ego; and the romantic temperament, which Classicist Gilbert Murray called "the glorification of passion - any passion-just because it is violent, overwhelming, unreasonable...
What else lies in store? Berg's Wozzeck, perhaps. A demanding performer who turned down a request by Herbert von Karajan to sing Beckmesser because he disagreed with Karajan's concept, Prey is currently mulling a couple of offers to sing the foremost 20th century antihero. He plans to ignore the tradition of croaking and barking the role that has evolved since the challenging opera's premiere in 1925. "Berg wanted a beautiful voice," says Prey. "I want to sing every note as it is written...
History is a nightmare into which the antihero of Good sleepwalks. John Haider (Alan Howard) is a decent enough human being. He is kind to his wife Helen (Meg Wynn-Owen), though she is an execrably sloppy homemaker. Even if he has to cook the meal, he sees to it that his three children are properly fed. With his mother (Marjorie Yates), who is blind, senile and bitter, Haider is agonizingly solicitous...
...want to hear a warm, thrilling voice cry out, Hallelujah! Hallelujah! I'm alive!" So spoke Jimmy Porter, the cold, cauterizing antihero of John Osborne's 1956 play Look Back in Anger. And so might an American viewer today appraise the three major TV networks, where the individual voice tends to get lost in the Valium murmur of a hundred soap sellers, newscasters and tough private eyes. For the unique noise of a writer's whirring mind or an actor's seductive rhetoric, one could only turn in gratitude to PBS and its Great Performances...
...might be possible to care more about Haider and his plight if he were not such a typically alienated antihero. The hero of the evening is Alan Howard. His is a meticulously stylized performance and a memorable display of the actor's craft. Howard's array of arid classroom gestures and pinched facial nerves is matched by a voice that barks, chokes, melts and freezes. And when he does a close-to-floor-level, slow-motion goose-step, the monstrous history of the Third Reich seems to be marching past...