Word: ionesco
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...most chilling modern parables is a short scenario of the absurd by Eugene Ionesco titled Anger...
...returned. Crockery goes smashing. Soup (with flies) pours in torrents from under doors. The police arrive. The civic disturbance turns, absurdly, into global war, and then into an atomic Armageddon. The final scene, projected on television, is of the planet exploding-because of a fly in the soup. Ionesco's black joke scarcely exaggerates the monstrous disproportion, the near pathology, of latter-day anger. If every period has its characteristic emotion, anger must surely be ours-the mask of cracked civility, the furious heart beneath. Yale President Kingman Brewster described the comparative calm of the American campus last winter...
Without pity or grief or laughter, anger is neither moral nor healthy but simply dehumanizing. In Ionesco's scenario, just before the planet blows up, a man sitting in a café turns puce and explodes. Which is more destructive, Ionesco seems to ask, the atom bomb that swats all those flies or the chain-reaction anger behind it, disintegrating a man into his obsessions? In either case, the Ionesco moral is clear: in the 20th century, anger requires safety standards...
...ACTING is in general very good. Peter Wright has successfully avoided playing Berenger as a pathetic little idealist who has somehow wandered into an Ionesco play and gives him dignity beneath the sloth. His sleepy Yogi the Bear voice is highly suited for the role and very appealing. The only defect of his performance is that he doesn't seem changed enough and truly defiant in the end. His defiance may be a joke to the audience but it cannot be a joke to himself...
...production is well worth seeing. Ionesco's popularity may be on the wane these days, but his best plays- and this is one of them- are always worthy of attention...