Word: ciulei
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Dates: during 1978-1978
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Gogol promised Pushkin, who gave him the idea for the plot, that his play would be "funnier than hell." It is fair to assume that Gogol meant the stress to fall equally on the first and last words. Greatly gifted though he is, Rumanian Director Liviu Ciulei has ignored the balance and projected the work as knockabout farce with an infusion of German impressionism. The result is that the characters become animated puppets and imbecilic caricatures of venality. They are robbed of the quality of vulnerable humanity that lies at the heart of the play, the play wright...
With an aptly symbolic hand, the bril liant Rumanian director-designer Liviu Ciulei has erected a high mesh screen across the middle of Joseph Papp's off-Broadway Public Theater. All scenes of institutional ritual occur behind it. Before it is a leafy ground of freedom where the high school children escape to their for bidden trysts and utter the long and some times lustrous thoughts of youth...
...bare recital, this scants the joy and tenderness which British Playwright Edward Bond's adaptation squeezes from Wedekind's text, and Ciulei's gift for mocking that hollow army of unalterable law made up of parents and teachers...