Word: passionateness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Passion (by Elmer Rice) has not gone to Hamlet merely for its title; it has gone there, quite openly, for its basic characters and plot. Since many Hamlets of one kind or another preceded Shakespeare's, it is not out of line that others should follow it; after all, it is for being the most fascinating of English plays that Hamlet remains the most familiar...
With any such retelling comes the added fascination of comparison: it is like returning to a former home to see how someone else has furnished it. In Cue for Passion the furnishings are sparser and extremely modern, with a picture window to let in strong, clarifying, psychological light. Hamlet, called Tony Burgess, comes home-sulky, sneering, perverse-after two years in Asia, certain that his new stepfather was his mother's paramour, suspecting he is also his father's murderer. This is an Oedipus-uncomplex Hamlet, so drawn to his mother that he hated his father, so identified...
...Passion is interesting enough in its way, which is too merely intelligent a way. For the play seems less limited for how much it leaves out of Shakespeare than for how much it puts in of Freud. Plainly, Hamlet was made for Freud, but popular Freudianism much less so for Hamlet. To put all its neuroses in one bedstead is to rob a character of his tangled richness, a story of its resonant depths, and to turn what T.S. Eliot called "the Mona Lisa of literature" into a simple blueprint. And by adhering to such things as soliloquies and ghosts...
Slim, tousle-haired Jeannette Vermeersch, wife of ailing Red Boss Maurice Thorez and herself Communist candidate for the National Assembly, spoke with passion for two hours. She railed against "capitalist exploiters," but her words fell on a lethargic gathering of scarcely 30 people, even though she was speaking in the grimy 18th arrondissement, the reddest of the Red districts of Paris. In tiny Ecurie (pop. 362), only 15 men and a runny-nosed boy turned out to hear Socialist Guy Mollet review his premiership, blame "the Americans" for preventing the Anglo-French conquest of Suez. Were any problems bothering...
...infinitely cruder painting, it is the strength of Homer's honesty that tells. This week, 48 years after Homer's death. Washington's National Gallery is honoring his memory with a big retrospective show. The 241 pictures proved to the hilt that Homer's passion was for realizing life as he saw it. and as forthrightly as he possibly could. Said Museum Director John Walker: "One of our functions is to honor great American artists of the past, and we plan to keep on doing it with shows like this every two years; but Homer...