Word: decorum
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...studies. Words like hubris (head-spinning pride) and catharsis (purgation by pity and terror) begin to assume a certain noble abstractness. A sense of transcendental symmetry emerges, and on cue, a stately chorus preaches its final sermon of moderation to all those really excessive heroes. "Greek tragedy, my dear, decorum," Jean Genet wrote sarcastically in The Blacks. "The ultimate gesture is performed offstage...
...dandifies his role to the point where it is difficult to understand what the two women could see in him. Lorna Koski, as the woman scorned, strikes the most discordant note in the play. Unsuccessful at portraying Julia's passionate melodramatics, Koski appears to have lost not her decorum and good sense, but her wits. In contrast, the two fathers, played by Jeremiah Riemer and Peter Wirth, are delightfully comfortable in their roles, delivering their lines with spontaneous conviction. As the stupidly hapless doctor to whom Loenard conspires to marry off his adoring nuisance, Robert Stier is nearly perfect...
...probably would have worked better if Director Peter Collinson had not tried to slick it up with a lot of addled editing and improbable violence. Given the prevailing tone of careless hokum, two peformances are triumphant. Donald Pleasence appears as the head of intelligence, a man hilariously paralyzed by decorum. He is immaculately polite and sinister, whether ordering a libation or a liquidation. Pleasence's ambition is to run to ground an elusive agronomist portrayed by Vladek Sheybal, whose huge eyes pop out of his head like a couple of painted Ping Pong balls. Sheybal brings off a flaw...
...book. Victoria had seen him before, but she first fell in love with this blue-and-blond Parsifal in 1839. "It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert-who is beautiful," she observed in her diary. Their correspondence from the beginning was a model of Victorian decorum and devotion ("Never, never did I think I could be loved so much"). Their engagement was long and set about with squabbles over precedence and income that Victoria, as was her custom, eventually resolved with regal finality. Albert seems to have been sexually tepid, as Victoria apparently was not. His priggishness...
...polite 19th century conventions of Shakespeare. Pseudo-traditional versions of Oedipus are staged as refined pageants. Directors assign masks, write long program notes about catharsis, and advise their puzzled Oedipuses to express hubris, which generally leaves them looking like damaged Roman coins. Langham has cut through the decorum of Greek revival to present Oedipus as a nightmare by Jung...