Word: hysterias
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...design. The Shakespearean moment, in the tragedies, is the restoration of order after individual or civil turmoil; in the comedies, it is the lover's mistaken identity. In Ibsen, it is self-doubt besetting the stolid bourgeois; in Strindberg, it is a shrill cry of female hysteria; in Shaw, it is paradoxical argument overturning a pose. Germany's late Bertolt Brecht, one of the 20th century's remarkable playwrights, has his own typical moment. In play after play, through changing locales, characters and moods, the Brechtian moment is man selling his fellow...
...Love he customarily handles as parody, death as an animal calamity, and time as a metronome of disaster. He brings full authority perhaps only to man's inhumanity to man and to the theme of money, one of the great neglected subjects of modern fiction and drama. A hysteria of violence hovers constantly at the outskirts of his work. Today that seems timely; in time it may seem merely tedious...
...disarming the unruly Congolese soldiers, the U.N. found the tables turned and its own Nigerian, Tunisian and Canadian soldiers being disarmed by the Congolese. As usual in the Congo, the whole thing started with a misunderstanding compounded by native Congolese hysteria. On a peaceful, sunny Sunday at a lake outside Leopoldville, where hundreds of Belgian families and off-duty U.N. employees had gone to picnic and swim, a U.N. truck with armed Tunisian U.N. troops drew up with urgent orders from Dayal's headquarters, instructing all U.N. people to leave the area immediately. On a nearby hillside, scores...
...being woefully-and willfully-obscure, Playwright lonesco in Rhinoceros is by curtain time all too obvious. To the most insistent of modern-day themes, conformity, he brings the most extravagant of illustrations: that, mass-pressured enough, people will even be rhinoceroses. What starts in a provincial French town as hysteria over a rhino running loose, ends as everybody's hysteria to become one. Logicians are as eager as businessmen, leftists as logicians; at the end just one fuddled clerk (attractively played by Eli Wallach) remains human. And even he vows not to capitulate only after ruefully condemning his appearance...
...Waltz of the Toreadors uses two sets--one the trophy laden drawing room of General St. Pe, for urbane drawing room comedy, the other the bedroom of his nagging, hypochondriac wife, used for one climactic scene of hysterical bedroom farce. The play's conflict is between hysteria and urbanity, the passionate idealism of youth and the orderly boredom of old age. (The General says, "Life, Gaston, is one long family lunch, tiresome because it has to be performed according to a long established ritual, with initialed napkin rings, embroidered table mats, forks of different shapes and sizes and a bell...