Word: beastes
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...fascinated by ritual. Just as he may portray a tale of rape and murder that has been repeated century after century by the Kabuki players of Japan, as in The Nun and the Skull, so he is drawn to the bull rings, where year after year man and beast have performed their ballet with death. Then he might do a painting of a little girl listening to "the sound of flowers," or of two praying nuns, one of whom seeks, and one of whom has heard, the voice of God. Violent or tender, these are supremely lonely acts, and they...
...Like Duerrenmatt, Frisch has a dour and sardonic vision of existence; unlike Duerrenmatt, he is maddeningly repetitive. What he spent more than four hours saying in his ear-bending, double-entry U.S. debut was once compressed by Alexander Hamilton into a single pungent sentence: "The people is a great beast...
People are beasts, in Andorra, for committing or permitting atrocities like the Nazi massacre of the Jews and then disowning responsibility for it. They are beasts, in The Firebugs, for giving arsonists the houseroom and the matches to set the world ablaze while they dunderheadedly pursue business as usual. The paradoxical difficulty is that Frisch hopes to arouse the conscience of the beast after demonstrating at tedious length that the beast has no conscience...
...billowing native garb. His new-found joy, alas, is rudely shattered: he is mistreated by Jose Ferrer, playing a Turkish delight, and cozened by Jack Hawkins--that is, the Turks outrage his body, and the English his ideals. This double misfortune turns our Good Shepherd into an apocalyptic beast, who incites ("No prisoners!") a gratuitous massacre of fleeing Turks...
...arrogance and his gibbering self-doubt; his headlong courage, girlish psychasthenia, Celtic wit, humorless egotism, compulsive chastity, sensuous pleasure in pain. But there is something he does not catch, and that something is an answer to the fundamental enigma of Lawrence, a clue to the essential nature of the beast, a glimpse of the secret spring that made him tick...