Word: dramatistic
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Congreve was the master dramatist of the genre and of its convoluted mechanics. Plots, subplots, stratagems, backfiring intrigues and unmaskings make up The Way of The World. In simplest terms, the play hangs on a purse string. The superannuated but insatiably lustful Lady Wishfort (Jessica Tandy) controls a fortune and has an itch for the philanderer Mirabel (Jeremy Brett). He, in turn, has fallen in love with her niece Millamant (Maggie Smith) and schemes to blackmail Lady Wishfort in order to secure her consent to his marriage to Millamant. That is just about what happens...
...pivotal center of the comedy is S Millamant, as iridescent a creature as a g dramatist ever pinned on paper. She is almost a pre-Shavian heroine, a kind of ' sexier cousin to Shaw's Major Barbara. Like Barbara, she is independent in mind and as spirited as a thoroughbred. Unlike Barbara, Millamant is a complete coquette, full of feminine witchcraft. She adores the marital chase but is eminently dubious about its outcome. She fears she "may dwindle into a wife." She faces marriage like a firing squad, but with her eyes open...
Hellman might have alleviated their guilt. She is a master dramatist; if it had been her intention, she would have structured a book of building tension and inner agony, climaxing in her triumph, in swells of applause and a vindicated life...
...writing for the London Sunday Times, James Agate commented that Noel Coward, "whether as dramatist or composer, has worked invariably for the passing moment, for the present laughter rather than the applause of posterity...Whatever he does, the effect is theatrical, greasepainted." These lines serve as an appropriate epigraph for Coward's life and work, and also for Kirkland House Drama Society's finely acted and tightly directed production of Coward's comedy Present Laughter...
Present Laughteris designed simply to entertain. Coward spoofs the "theater of ideas" advocated by Ibsen and Chekov in the character of Roland Maule, a young cuckoo-headed would-be playwright. Maule, a caricature of the "serious" dramatist, spouts streams of cliched arguments about "commercial theater," "intellectual significance,"and of course "posterity." Ironically Maule adores and admires Garry, who personified frivolous commercial theater...