Word: boredoms
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...BOREDOM, OF COURSE, is the great difficulty, and the play's object must be to infuse some kind of interest and meaning into life, to fill the unforgiving span between the raising and the lowering of the curtain. That effort requires constant shifts in tone and attitude, from politeness to frenzy, from despair to humor. The characters, drawn together from a series of stock circus and stage types, continually try on roles, haggle over phrases and actions, force each other to react. To pass the time, they stage themselves, singing, arguing, lyricizing-and, in what emerges as the heart...
...BORING TECHNIQUE. And boredom--a tense Godot-like waiting, the boredom of the recurrent cycle--is an essential fact of life in the cylinder. The wandering is circular. The pulsing of light and fluctuation of temperature form a cycle that is agonizing both in its recurrence and in the possibility that it will end: "Its restlessness at long intervals suddenly stilled like panting at the last. Then all go dead. It is perhaps the end of their abode. A few seconds and all begins again...
...work succeeds in isolating and containing the absurd, in all its tedium and inexplicability, if only in a sort of dadaist image, a kind of giant coffee can with strobe light. The boredom is less involving than in Godot, the texture of the prose less rich than in the novels, but by maintaining its peculiar notion. The Lost Ones creates a super-metaphor with a life of its own. Beckett's latest book looks at the world with intent, unshrinking understanding--and touches its expression with an uncertain gleam of the playful...
Nonetheless, the prosaic preparations for the summit, foreshadowing the entry of Britain, Ireland and Denmark into the EEC on Jan. 1, accurately reflect the current boredom with the whole idea of a united Europe. Little more than a decade ago, Spanish Philosopher Salvador de Madariaga grandly envisioned the day when "Spaniards will say 'our Chartres,' Italians 'our Copenhagen' and Germans 'our Bruges,' and will step back horror-stricken at the idea of laying murderous hands on it." Then there were dreams and drama; today there are mostly details...
...toils, no woman spins and no child is seen, let alone heard. There are no families, only menages of bright, brittle and bizarre people for whom life is one long marvelous party. His is a hermetic world sealed against headlines, problems and pain, and most of all against boredom, which to Coward is the eighth deadly...