Word: jairus
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...idea of postponed death, of several deaths marking the same life, transfixed de Ghelderode's imagination and animated what de Ghelderode called "my climatic work,"Miss Jairus, A Mystery in Four Tableaux...
...this Michel de Ghelderode? And why, if he wrote Miss Jairus in 1934, did it receive its American premiere only last Friday...
...Ghelderode (1898-1962) could justly be called an excellent obscure Flemish playwright if his works had not become so highly regarded in French, Belgian, and German theatre in the last decade. This year George Hauger completed two paperback volumes of translations of his plays, and Tufts apparently adopted Miss Jairus as soon as the English text became available...
...Ghelderode sets Miss Jairus, for example, in the house of a merchant in medieval Bruges. As the merchant Jairus and three old hags who are professional mourners keep a drunken vigil over his dead daughter, the daughter's finance suddenly brings in a sorcerer who has been confounding the local clerics and physicians. The finance, Jacquelin, cannot stand to lose Miss Jairus and demands that the sorcerer awake...
...ringing of distant bells, the coming of Death, as Lazarus, the whining and howling of mourners and a premonitory dog are all techniques of mystery and horror de Ghelderode has used in other plays. They combine in Miss Jairus with a plot-skeleton which is parable. In the final act, on Easter, as Miss Jairus dies, the townfolk commemorate the Holy Day by taking the sorcerer to a hill outside the town and crucifying...