Word: grandiere
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Plays based on historical events will often lapse into Romanticism or scuffle along as mere recounting, but Whiting successfully molded his material for the theatre. He deftly compresses the time span between the arrival of Father Urbain Grandier (Jason Robards, Jr.) in Loudon and his cremation at the stake for sorcery. In addition, he juxtaposes crucial scenes with each other. While Grandier refuses to confess under torture, his false accuser, Prioress Jeanne (Anne Bancroft) soliloquizes on her sins at the other side of the stage...
Whiting also creates a character of his own, a sewer worker, whose humble earthiness eventually teaches Grandier to find God in his fellow man. Whiting purposely contrasts the sewerman's habitual obscenities with both the eloquence of Grandier and the blasphemies of the hysterical Prioress. While the sewermen explains to Grandier about the caged bird he holds before him in the sewer to detect poisonous fumes, Grandier steps non-chalantly over an open manhole. Later Grandier will be imprisoned and sacrificed like the bird. Such subtle touches paint a picture of a man who constantly defies fortune and of whom...
...Whiting keeps his dialogue modern and even Soc Relish. Detailed arguments in the book often reappear contained in conversational sentences. For example, Huxley insists that men searching for evil do so from a sense of their own sinfulness. When the Archbishop in the play puts a temporary halt to Grandier's witch-trial and the chief exorcist complains that "the Archbishop has made evil impossible in this place," Whiting uncannily reveals the prosecutor's unconscious guilt...
Whiting's characterization reaches its peak with the Prioress. We first see her kneeling in prayer to God the Father like a child before her bedstead. Unresolved Oedipal problems combined with her throbbing sex drives cause her to fall in love with Father Grandier in her fantasy. When he refuses to become her Confessor, her love changes to hatred and she half-consciously destroys him with accusations. Soon the childishness that lingers in every woman, so pronounced in this neurotic, turns credibly and terrifyingly into hysterics...
Aldous Huxley meant his study of an historical incident to be both an abstraction of the witch-trial mentality and a critique of the McCarthy hearings. Whiting thankfully preserves the abstract quality even when tempted by the theatrical. On the night before his death, Huxley's Grandier instantly calms his fear when his older colleague assures him that "God is here." The playwright, however, foregoes the sudden conversion and instead has Grandier change slowly through the last...