Word: dionysians
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Your drama critic says that Glenda Jackson [May 5] has reduced Hedda Gabler's "Dionysian will to freedom" to a case of "suburban jitters." Is that a "travesty" or an updating? Hedda was trivialized before Ms. Jackson took her up. The "unfulfilled woman" has become a cliché, and that is indeed a tragedy...
...important of all, Hedda's self-hatred translates into a destructive hatred of others-her academic clod of a husband, George Tesman (Peter Eyre), for example, and her onetime lover, the writer Eilert Luvborg (Patrick Stewart). Her wrath stems from the fact that she has betrayed her own Dionysian will to freedom. She is an older Nora who failed to slam the door on parochialism, co vention and hypocrisy. Jackson reduces all that to the level of cocktail-party sarcasm and suburban jitters...
...coaxed, tricked and thundered at by a prosecuting psychiatrist, Martin Dysart (Anthony Hopkins). In a way, Dysart is a physician who cannot heal himself. At the Rokeby Psychiatric Hospital in southern England, he is a skeptical practitioner of Freudian exorcism. He is a devotee of reason yearning for Dionysian revels. He has a loveless marriage with a wife he has not even kissed in six years. He pores over pictures of Greek gods and tries to get close to pagan worship on vacations in the Peloponnesus...
...where the normal barriers of propriety, temperance, and privacy are transcended in a communal frenzy, where people aren't afraid to let their pants down. So, a few summers back, finding myself in Spain in July, I headed for Pamplona to pay my respects to San Fermin and his Dionysian worshippers. After a sleepless all-night train ride, crushed into a stuffy corridor crammed with Spaniards on their way to Pamplona, I arrived on the first day of the fiesta. The city was jammed and the wine had already begun to flow in the streets. I promptly bought myself...
...afflicted by artiness, more than a touch of paranoia and a very odd walk. Roth often seems as baffled as the reader as to why Tarnopol should marry this "cornball Clytemnestra" for whom he feels no affection or even lust. Does Maureen represent the muse of disorder, the Dionysian element every artist suspects he needs? Or is she a case of purest masochism-the general contention of Dr. Spielvogel, Tarnopol's analyst, a literary referral from Portnoy...