Word: chulkaturin
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...second level, Journey of the Fifth Horse is a parable about mankind. Chulkaturin, reading from his diary, tells the tale of the titular fifth horse, harnessed for some mysterious reason to a coach which already boasts a full complement of four horses. The coachman, who has shackled the fifth horse so clumsily as to make it chafe and bleed, explains that the animal has no purpose in life but to run, senselessly and painfully. Chulkaturin thinks of himself in terms of this story, for he and the fifth horse are both defined by an utterly characterless superfluity...
Zoditch shares this trait with Chulkaturin and the fifth horse, but he does so unconsciously--as his overinflated sense of self-importance suggests. Journey of the Fifth Horse thus seems a treatment of modern man's alienation from his work. But because the landowing Chulkaturin also suffers from alienation, the play is more than a fable about the unsatisfied white-collar worker. Zoditch and Chulkaturin and the fifth horse represent Everyman, harnessed without reason to a life which he does not understand and cannot hope to change...
...Chulkaturin, infinitely more pleasant than Zoditch, has become gently pensive as a result of his own failure to win hearts both male and female. After one aborted attempt to win a girl's heart and thus to make an impression, he retreats--very gracefully, for a graceless character--into the background, and dies without complaint...
...male stars act impeccably. Grusin's twitching, hunched, sour-eyed Zoditch recalls a Scrooge who has out-eaten his suit size and suffers itching and cramping as a result. Benedict constructs a mournful, perpetually apologetic Chulkaturin who simultaneously invites scorn and nurturing, contempt and sympathy. In a lesser part, Jeremy Geidt plays a convincingly gruff, patriarchal Ozhogin, father to the object of Chulkaturin's clumsy and unrequited youthful affections...
...interplay of Chulkaturin's memories and Zoditch's quotidian existence is handled very cleverly even on a purely physical level. Because the memoirs come alive only through the readership of Zoditch, Chulkaturin's history is played out among the paraphernalia of Zoditch's boarding house. The first reader's bed serves the focus for much of the action--parior scenes, forest scene, garden scenes all occur around the bed, on which Zoditch, himself sits, reading the manuscript, impervious and scornful...