Word: melodrama
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...drama and treacherous for any actor, demanding the illusions of drunkenness, terminal illness sudden realizations and even borderline madness. Fortunately for this production as a whole. Bart Naylor's performance as the son is close to flawless. In a play that leaves much scope for crossing the line to melodrama and heavy handedness, and in a presentation in which the other actors allow themselves from time to time to slip over the edge. Naylor creates an agonizingly credible and sympathetic character. The realism of his emotion is never marred by a tendency towards the soap operatic...
...take their lumps on the ice, then pass them along to the womenfolk in the bedroom. Loretta's steadfast affection for Dillon is meant to be win some, cockeyed and noble all at once. But in this benighted melodrama, com passion and indulgence are the same, and women are the stronger vessel be cause they take their punishment with a tear and a smile...
...charity. Drach grabs at the heartstrings with harpy's fingers. "Mama," says handsome little Michel, moist-eyed, "what's a Jew?" When the story threatens to go pallid, Drach drums up suspense. The episode of escape across the border could have come out of some prison-camp melodrama: snarling dogs, relentless Nazis armed with machine guns, and desperate scrambles through thick woods, open fields and barbed wire...
...psychiatric technique of abreaction--the literal replaying of key events--on stage. This allows him to get anything he wants on stage without any question of its being out of place. The choreographed ritual of the blinding, over in an instant, is much less like melodrama when it comes at the end of the play, the logical last step of the psychiatric treatment, rather than, for example, the opening scene. Complaints by practicing psychiatrists that Shaffer fails their test of "psychiatric realism" and oversimplifies their techniques are justified, but only in a narrow, technical sense. But other criticism raised...
MIDNIGHT is A PLACE. 287 pages. Viking. $6.95. ARABEL'S RAVEN. 118 pages. Doubleday. $4.95. Both by Joan Aiken. The author of that incomparable melodrama The Wolves of Willoughby Chase has two remarkably different books out this year, both splendid. Midnight Is a Place is a savage yet romantic tale about what befalls a boy and girl, suddenly homeless and penniless, in a terrifyingly real and at the same time satisfyingly imaginary industrial city in 19th century Britain. This smoke-filled place is appropriately called Blastburn. Among other chores for survival, the girl collects cigar butts from gutters...