Word: pirandellian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Furious, Lena picks a fight with Börje, who takes off back to the city in his MG. At film's end, the two have paid a joint visit to a delousing clinic and have effected a kind of Pirandellian reconciliation, applying less to their roles in the movie than to their extracurricular relationship. Intercut with this dreary dramaturgy are endless man-on-the-street interviews conducted by Lena ("Do you think that Swedish society has a class system?" "Do you belong to the labor movement?") and lots of shots of Sjöman making the film...
Their torment is increased by the suggestion of incest, and by the fact that their father killed their mother and committed suicide. Outwardly, this seems like native dramatic country for Tennessee Williams. But the new note is a Pirandellian ambiguity as the characters continually shift between their two poles of reality. Are these actors 'playing a mad brother and sister, or are they a mad brother and sister playing actors? In any event, the psychic locale of the play is a kind of streetcar named despair; the loaded revolver that glints with menace in the closing scene...
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD puts a Shakespearean duo in a Pirandellian situation, then confers on them Beckettian angst mixed with Beyond the Fringe humor. British Playwright Tom Stoppard's play is well served by the acting of Brian Murray and John Wood and the direction of Derek Goldby...
...Times stated--but not for their reason. To be sure, Albee did introduce here a certain dramatic device. Critical ethics prevent me from joining Kerr and Taubman in revealing it specifically. I shall only say that the neo-naturalistic style of the first two acts turns somewhat Pirandellian in the third, which treats the theme so eloquently examined in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh...
...most flares and flashes is a scathing, mocking Negro anger toward the whites. Where in Genet's The Balcony men act out their dreams, in The Blacks they act out their nightmares as well. Often unbridled, sacrilegious, obscene, The Blacks is echoing too at times, with travestied ceremonies, Pirandellian illusion and reality, a sense of secular Black Masses and King Lear mock trials. A savage Negro assault that is also a Genet indictment, in places The Blacks indicts the savagery as well...