Word: guignol
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...onetime chapel is now Le Theatre du Grand-Guignol (The Theater of the Big Puppets), the greatest horror show on earth. As a tourist attraction, it has ranked for years with the Eiffel Tower, Picasso, and the late maisons de tolerance...
Last week Grand-Guignol began its 50th season with four new short plays which had been toned down for the benefit of queasy critics. It was not like the old days; there were only three gruesome murders, and there was no torture more horrendous than a barehanded strangulation. Nobody in the audience even fainted. The spectators, mostly old Guignol-goers and a few youngsters whose parents had warned them not to go, lounged around on rough wooden benches and had a modest emotional binge. A few couples in screened baignoires had another kind of binge on the indifferent house champagne...
...actor from the Yiddish Art Theater. Stalin, with his low forehead, ferally cautious manner, soft but searching eyes (says Trotsky: "The jaundiced glint of his eyes impelled sensitive people to take notice"), might but for his size (5 ft. 5 in.) have been a heavy from the Grand Guignol...
...rest were patients, most of them in wheel chairs or on crutches, canes and artificial legs. Guffawing noisily and applauding wildly, they found the show very taking and apparently therapeutic. To outsiders, however, Grand Lawsony was so grim and painful at times that it seemed more like Grand Guignol. After an opening cancan by Red Cross nurses, the show shifted to a foxhole where a one-armed G.I. dubbed Manny Tomville dreams of ordering "breakfast and a blonde to match," is rewarded with pirouetting amputees dressed as girls. Other scenes...
...which sometimes he overdoes. If corpses dropped less often than ripe plums, in less tricky postures of amazement at death, and if fingers moved less automatically to triggers, this would have been a better novel. Even as it is, a queer cross between a Freudian dream and a Grand Guignol shocker, it is good enough to suggest that it will almost certainly sire a better...