Word: played
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...rank and becomes deputy chief of the army's espionage service. Sexually, he undergoes a kind of moral regress. A disinclination to make love to women awakens him to his own homosexuality. As an ever more active queer, he is blackmailed by Russian intelligence into turning traitor. At play's end, he is exposed, presented with a pistol, and shoots himself...
Niagara from a Faucet. Unless Osborne means to suggest that homosexuals are poor security risks (pace Joe McCarthy), the play is baffling. An entirely incredible epilogue links Redl to the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to World War I and everything that followed-which is rather like getting Niagara Falls out of a leaky faucet...
...subject. The evening's coup de théâtre is the drag ball that opens Act II. Lavishly costumed for a kind of inverts' Mardi Gras, the imperial army's top officers cavort in the home of the Baron von Epp. Dennis King plays the role in tiara and gown, and flutters an imperious fan with the regal disdain of a queen of players. At no other point does the play rise to this level of theatricality. Salome Jens adorns the evening physically as a Russian Mata Hari, but she delivers her lines like a fishwife...
...death knell of the realistic play is sounded every season, and each season some play refutes it. A Whistle in the Dark is just such a drama. It has the raw, roiling energy of life. It is full of the rude poetry of the commonplace. It states truths about human nature that one would rather forget, and reminds one that being born human is the alltime crisis of every...
Paralyzed by Inadequacy. This is where the play actually begins, and the events that follow have resonances of The Homecoming-though Irish Playwright Thomas Murphy's play was produced four years before Pinter's. The brothers make passes at Michael's wife and even suggest using his home as a whorehouse. Michael is faced down, raged at and humiliated by his father, who is a perfect blend of aging bull and undiminished blarney. Michael's wife urges him to stand up for his rights. But he is paralyzed by a nagging sense of masculine inadequacy...