Word: duerrenmatt
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FRIEDRICH DUERRENMATT...
Frittered Away. All of this might have been made into a trim mystery of the puzzle-solving variety except for two factors. The first is that it is based on a novel by Co-Scenarist Duerrenmatt, who must cloud the simplest scenes with a thick layer of existential gas. Director Schell, who helped anesthetize the script, compounds that error by directing in a style that is virtually an anthology of antique art-movie clichés as practiced on the Continent...
...this is a narrowly drawn onenote, or perhaps two-note kind of performance. It mixes rage and exhaustion the way old club fighters hack away and then fall into each other's clinch, softly drubbing the kidneys, to rest for a little while. (A few years ago, Friedrich Duerrenmatt staged The Dance of Death literally as a boxing match...
...FRIEDRICH DUERRENMATT...
Like Bertolt Brecht and Max Frisch, Switzerland's Friedrich Duerrenmatt is one of those didactic dramatists who regard the theater as a classroom, the stage as a blackboard, the pen as a pointer and the playgoers as barely educable dolts. These playwrights take a dim view of man, dividing the species into two arbitrary categories: predators and prey, the fleecers and the fleeced. No one would deny that such characters are abundantly present in life, but to see the entire pattern of human behavior in these terms is one-eyed vision. As propounded in The Visit, currently being revived...