Word: beckettian
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...with a twinkle, that fear has hovered over him for years. In his mind he is a poetic playwright, but the world has seen him as a political, even polemic one, and his works are valued more as testimony against apartheid than for their subtle interplay of emotion and Beckettian sensitivity to the downtrodden. For many people, Fugard's dramas mattered less than the taboos they broke -- The Blood Knot put a black actor alongside a white one on the same Johannesburg stage -- and the punishments they brought, including revocation of his passport and virtual house arrest from...
...blame back and forth, and the Ill pair constantly trying to escape reality. He takes a more scholarly view as well, comparing O'Neill's use--and modern drama's--of alcohol and drugs for truth telling to the Elizabethans' similar use of madness. He emphasizes O'Neill's Beckettian use of time; the play progresses and regresses, time has stopped, night and day have converged throughout. The maneuver demonstrates what Berlin calls one of O'Neill's most cardinal beliefs--"The past is the present...
There is certainly comic potential in Jonathan Lemkin's black and white, three-dimensional wood-carving set, with three great, storybook houses rising out of a gorgeously detailed back-drop. But Alex Begin's harsh, bright lighting makes the set seem stark, even Beckettian. It comes to life only during an imaginative sunset-to-sunrise sequence in the second act, acquiring magical, mysterious depth. Valerie Hobb's colorful, deliriously clashing costumes also don't take the light particularly well--they look as if they could use a sprinkle of MSG to bring them out. But they are stuffed with modest...
However, Schlondorff fails to give a similar sense of irony to a Beckettian sequence with an eel fisherman on a stark beach. While Oskar keeps a cold, dark view on life, the film changes tone: now it is bleak and blue, now it is warm and red. Does Schlondorff misunderstand his little hero or has he simply made only token efforts at linking each sequence to the whole? He manages to reduce the most profound chapter of Grass' novel, a discussion about art and life between a midget magician and a soliderly artist to a frolicking picnic atop a cement...
...unified the whole oeuvre is in a movement towards its own final extinction. Molloy is a descendent of Watt, and a cousin to Mercier et Camier; Godot is grandfather to Lessness. Alvarez's book is written at a time and from a critical viewpoint that successfully demonstrate this Beckettian family of worlds in generation, and gives a sense of its underlying rhythms. For Beckett, the search for less--and finally for nothing--is the search for an art without content except itself...