Word: misunderstoodness
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...obsession. If commercials and studies haven’t convinced you that the playlist has grown too large in the cultural mind, I’ll draw your attention to the recent film “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist.” Two misunderstood teens fall in love over a series of break-up mixes and a passion for the indie-est of fictional indie bands, Where’s Fluffy? At one point, while scrolling through Nick’s iPod, Norah proclaims, “We are musical soulmates...
...will also be on target. And we will never return to the old boom and bust." Thus Gordon Brown, as Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, in his Budget statement only last year. No Chancellor since the war has quite so disastrously misread the economic situation, or so fundamentally misunderstood the inescapable nature of market economies - namely, that the greater the binge, the greater the hangover. Today, Britain is on the brink of recession, inflation has jumped to 4.7%, the housing bubble has burst, and mortgage lender Bradford & Bingley has just been nationalized...
...tend to broaden the comedy and stomp all over the delicate (and very British) nuances. It's as if they still believe that silly Neil Simon tag. Better to compare Ayckbourn--who, at 61, has written nearly 60 plays and directs them himself--to another artist whose work was misunderstood in his lifetime, Alfred Hitchcock. Both worked in popular genres that had few pretensions to art--the suspense thriller and the domestic comedy. Both were technical virtuosos who loved to set themselves challenges in their chosen medium. And both managed to entertain audiences while exploring the most profound questions...
...first, my narcissism led me to believe that I was the only one who had such misgivings. But when puberty hit, I discovered the enchanted world of existentialist literature and alternative music. Suddenly, I was no longer a freak; I belonged to an aristocracy of misunderstood brooders and first-rate melancholics. I read Camus, rocked out to the Smashing Pumpkins, dressed in black—the usual clichés. Like all thirteen-year-olds, I was a loser. But in my mind, I was deep and bohemian, a genuine suburban Übermensch...
...which, one hopes, will spark a fresh reappraisal of the work of the most misunderstood, and very likely best, playwright currently writing in English. That is far from a widespread view. In America, Ayckbourn is still typecast, anachronistically, as a lightweight boulevard farceur (the "British Neil Simon"), or simply as a clever deviser of staging gimmicks: plays that squeeze the action in several rooms into one space, or move backward in time, or fill up the stage with water, or (in his insanely ambitious Intimate Exchanges) have no fewer than 16 dramatic permutations, depending on which alternative action the characters...