Word: brecht
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Antithesis of Brecht. In this "farce to make you sad," Ghelderode systematically and satirically derides all the causists who ever hoped to remold the world. There is Pantagleize's Negro servant Bamboola, a naive firebrand who believes that overnight "the Negroes will be made white." There is Blank, a poet who dabbles in politics and diddles in literature. There is Innocenti, a lawyer passing as a waiter and living out the logical absurdity of a politically engaged nihilist. Pantagleize is oblivious to all except Rachel Silberchatz, a Jewish girl as splinteringly comic in her undeviating revolutionary fanaticism as Pantagleize...
...dramatic terms, Ghelderode is the antithesis of Brecht. Ghelderode trusted in instinct; Brecht worshiped intellect. Brecht called for a didactic theater of ideology; Ghelderode scorned ideologies and celebrated the theater of magic, spectacle and mystery. He saw all men divided and torn on a Manichaean battleground of darkness and light, flesh and spirit, and he never lost his conviction that they danced at the end of fate's string. If his plays are sometimes episodic and full of antic despair, they also display the probing gallantry of quests. Ghelderode could say with his hero in Christophe Colomb: "Farewell, America...
Numerous contemporary writers obviously produce poshlost or are, for other reasons, Nabokov's black pets. "Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht, Faulkner, Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me, and I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted as 'great literature' by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterley's copulations or the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total fake. I note he has replaced...
AFTER THE RAIN is an eggshell of a play from an egghead playwright. John Bowen borrows and embalms theatrical modes and ideas from Bertolt Brecht, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and Peter Weiss and colors them in a fashionable shade of apocalypstick. As the tyrannical leader of a Noah-like band of survivors from the flood of 1969, Alec McCowen is convincingly diabolical as he plucks open the soul of a power maniac...
...nurture new plays and playwrights. Up to now they have been pretty timid about it. The tendency is to cater to the subscribers' varied tastes by dividing a season between classics, proven Broadway hits of recent vintage, and such fashionable avantgardists as lonesco, Beckett, Pinter and the ubiquitous Brecht. More ambitious than most, Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum is genuinely trying to offer original plays. One such experiment, Oliver Hailey's Who's Happy Now?, opened last week to generally happy notices by local reviewers...