Word: freuds
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Miss Stanley still hasn't arived in Act I, Scene II, and we see instead a family reunion of all the Freuds. With the hugging and kissing, one is reminded of the Trapp Family Singers. But after that, the play settles down to an effective depiction of Freud's first psycho-analysis and his struggles to have his theories accepted...
...hard to see how even the most hairy-handed technique could tarnish a play about Sigmund Freud's first case. There is a certain morbid fascination about a pretty young lady in the throes of psychosomatic illness that would enlist most people's interest even if it were done by marionettes in High German...
Thus Henry Denker, the author of The Far Country, had a head start when he embarked on his dramatization of Freud's treatment of Elizabeth von Ritter. Whether he increased his lead very much is open to question. There is much to be praised in The Far Country, but there are also some embarrassing weak spots...
Before her appearance, things are going pretty badly, Act I, Scene 1 takes place in 1938, almost 40 years after the body of the action, as Freud and his wife prepare to evacuate their Vienna flat. This seems pointless, especially when nothing later on refers back to it. Well, almost nothing. As the curtain rises on the last scene, the audience sees the flat as it looked in the beginning, with most of the furniture gone and the bookcases empty. At least, one would expect somebody to come on and say, "Who was that masked man anyway?" and somebody else...
Farce cannot function without this aggressiveness. Bentley stated. He agreed with Freud that innocent jokes do not make us laugh. "We want satire, obscenity, and attack." Thus farce is the only dramatic form in which an actor can lap his mother-in-law with humorous effects...