Word: dysart
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...that outweighs its criticism of psychiatric assumptions. Shaffer doesn't take the extreme position of many modern playwrights, that madness is better than sanity; he only goes so far as to say that madness might be better than sanity, in some cases. In the end we feel sorrier for Dysart than the boy he has spiritually emasculated; Strang comes to love Big Brother and utterly forget that hating him is a much more intense and ennobling experience. Dysart must see himself as spitefully smothering flames in others that he longs for but can never ignite himself...
...discovers the origins of the crime in the boy's upbringing, in which new psychiatric clues, like the picture of a horse that replaced a print of a suffering Christ, enjoy the same status as, say, the murder weapon in a Perry Mason. Peter Firth (Strang) and Anthony Hopkins (Dysart) put more passion and energy into their roles than you can find in half a dozen revivals of "Where's Charley?" Hopkins (who played Pierre Bezoukhov in the BBC War and Peace) spits his words into the air with tortured eloquence. Firth bounds from the catatonic to the hyperactive with...
Part of the drama lies in watching Dysart wield his liontamer's chair, part in watching what happens to him as he is forced to compare his own barren life with the daily ecstasies of his patient. But the most powerful part of the drama is Shaffer's use of the psychiatric technique of abreaction--the literal replaying of key events--on stage. This allows him to get anything he wants on stage without any question of its being out of place. The choreographed ritual of the blinding, over in an instant, is much less like melodrama when it comes...
John Simon has had a lot of fun with the speech Dysart makes in which he points all this out. It's the one speech in the play the audience breaks out into spontaneous applause for, and Simon remarks that this is a bizarre reaction from a group of people most of whom would unhesitatingly call you crazy if, one day, you wore two socks that didn't match to work. But when Hopkins proves to the audience that incomprehensibly different from our own as the boy's state of mind may be, he may be happier than...
These old and new gods meet in something like a boxing ring that represents Dysart's office; Dysart recalls the progress of the case and the characters he talks of come in on cue, sometimes getting up out of seats they occupy in the student-section-grandstand that faces the regular seating from the back of the stage. The horses are played by lithe men in brown corduroy, with soldered skeletons of horse's hooves and pullover horse's heads. Everything works, except for the use of loudspeakers to amplify the horse's cries; but these aren't used often...