Word: macbeth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence; the cream rises until it sours." People who show competence are promoted whether or not they are qualified to perform competently at the next level. Eventually they go beyond their limits, become incompetent, and stop getting promoted. Macbeth, a success as a military commander, rose to become an incompetent king. Which is to say, "nothing fails like success...
...frail, solitary boat pitches and tosses in an angry, moonlit sea. An apocalyptic horseman gallops around a desolate racecourse, scythe at the ready. Christ, risen from the grave, appears to Mary Magdalene in a somber garden, Macbeth conspires with the witches on a wind-blasted heath, and Siegfried happens across the Rhine maidens bathing seductively in a river bordered by strangely twisted trees...
...intend to kill your mother?" produce wildly inappropriate laughter from an audience saturated with Freud. The prevailing style of the evening is that of neo-Shakespearean swashbuckling, and the barely adequate cast seems to relish all opportunities for bombast and comic clowning. The chorus resembles the witches from Macbeth multiplied. The murders might as well have been performed by Richard III. Elizabethan Greeks are a novelty all right, but they reduce the play to historical pageantry, horseplay and melodrama when it ought to be blindingly focused on man's ineluctable rendezvous with fate...
...lesser girl, say Lady Macbeth, might panic, but not Dorothy. She just launches Lewis on a film career, marries Paul, and the three of them live togather happily ever after. "Obviously I would have trouble stopping Lewis from killing people," she sighs, "but with a little supervision and luck...
Which is all fine and good, except Shakespeare wrote a supreme anti-climax. In the text (cut from this production) Troilus and his romantic replacement Diomedes fight one another across the stage three times, Shakespeare resorting to familiar mechanics prior to an important killing as he does in Macbeth and several of the history plays. But the killing never comes, they fight their way offstage, we never see them again, our expectations are brutally cheated. Instead, Hector (decidedly the wrong man at this point) gets killed with his pants down by Achilles, and the play ends with nothing resolved...