Word: huxleyism
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John Whiting's The Devils skillfully transforms Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudon, a narrative chocked with explication, into an excellent drama. However, Michael Cacoyannis, the director, fails to realize that The Devils, although camouflaged as an historical play, stands firmly in the abstract and psychological tradition of modern drama...
Resisting the temptation to use archaic dialogue, 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...
...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...
...sane and balanced Grandier, but Anne Bancroft still overplays it. Her Prioress believes too completely in her demoniac possesion, so we miss that nether-land between consciousness and unconsciousness in which the real Soeur Jeanne acted. Miss Bancroft also plays the unpossessed sequences with an overflowing wholesomeness, while Huxley discloses her character as both bitter and shallow...
Nuclear war, carried to holocaust, may yet scour the plan-Earth; the "ultimate deterrent" may become, in Julian Huxley's phrase, the "ultimate detergent." But it is a valid interim observation that The Bomb seems to be keeping peace quite effectively among its possessors, bearing out ChurchiII's ironic comment that he "looked forward with great confidence to the potentiality of universal destruction." Illogically, the general feeling that nuclear war equals suicide or surrender has induced a similar sentiment among some that any war is unthinkable. But a Pentagon count of conventional wars since 1945 adds...