Word: banqueteer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...loving father who gave out tobacco-smelling kisses" and wrote kind letters promising his daughter pomegranates from the Black Sea coast. She tries to dispose of the old rumor that Stalin murdered her mother, who was his second wife. They had a little quarrel at a Kremlin banquet in honor of the 15th anniversary of the November revolution, Svetlana concedes, but she insists that her mother shot herself that evening. "The fact is," says Svetlana, "that Stalin himself never killed anything in his life except hawks and hares, and did not know...
...candid but forbidden photographs: "unsuitable pictures taken from unsuitable angles, the averted face of the world in which [the tyrant] moved, a parade of folly, a riot of vanity, a debauch of cowardice-s a stark naked general dancing the csúrdú among the cakes on a banquet table, a collective orgy of rural bosses...
...doesn't know how to build action to a climax, either. Before the grand banquet, he offers several episodes as hors d'oeuvres. But it's like serving nine varieties of salami, then bringing on roast duck. By that time you've lost your appetite for animal flesh...
...handling of the banquet scene is superb. Shakespeare intended that someone impersonating a ghost should actually appear here twice; and it was always done this way from his day until Kemble's production of 1794. Nonetheless, it is wrong. And director Houseman was right to substitute a weak red spotlight instead (which has the added virtue of avoiding a decision as to whether one of the two appearances is the ghost of Duncan rather than of Banquo). The apparitions are hallucinatory and visible only to Macbeth. It makes no more sense to bring in a ghost visible...
With guests scattered and Macbeth alone, Colicos comes downstage and puts a hand to his temple as though plagued by a fearsome migraine. The banquet hall darkens and is subjected to a continuously moving mottled light, whereupon we hear the Witches for the last time. This staging makes it seem that Macbeth's final encounter with the Witches is one more hallucination...