Word: playwrighting
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...probably. But wordplay soon swamps a vigorous plot. Much traditional writing is, you might say, in this book linguistically taboo, a vast anomaly calling for a radical, slightly wacky approach to put things right. To wit, this famous soliloquy that a world-class playwright wrought for a moody Scandinavian scion: "Living or not living: that is what I ask." Or an alcoholic bard's notoriously rhythmical night thoughts: "'Twas upon a midnight tristful I sat poring, wan and wistful/ Through many a quaint and curious list full of my consorts slain." A mournful coda follows: "Quoth that Black Bird...
Bring on the chamber pots and powdered wigs! Don't be turned off by a dry title announcing a seemingly dry period of history. "The Madness of King George" is a wild ride in a staid carriage. Virtually identical to British playwright Alan Bennett's very successful original stage play, Nicholas Hynter's film is not only great entertainment, but quality cinema...
...Playwright August Wilson -- who wrote The Piano Lesson and Fences -- begins his new play with a scene in which a group of friends are mourning the death of Floyd Barton, a blues guitarist and singer whose career was about to take off when he died. The rest of the play, about Barton's rocky life, is "enormously promising and filled with colorful sketches of dialogue and very appealing characters" says TIME critic Bill Tynan. As the end of the play approaches, however, both the "plotting and the ideas get muddy, so it isn't as moving as it should...
...what he has described as a coda to his seven-hour Pulitzer-prizewinning epic Angels in America, playwright Tony Kushner has written a little one-act vaudeville called Slavs!, fuzzily subtitled Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness. In 80 wordy minutes, Kushner scampers through seven years in the collapse of Russian communism (the second half of Angels, remember, was called Perestroika) and bounces from the Kremlin to a fantastic archive housing the bottled brains of dead party leaders to a Siberia-like heaven. His final line asks, as Lenin did, "What is to be done?" Audiences...
This was drama as rant, an explosion of bad manners, a declaration of war against an empire in twilight. The acid tone, at once comic and desperate, sustained Osborne throughout a volatile career as playwright, film writer (Tom Jones) and memoirist (A Better Class of Person). More important, it stoked a ferment in a then sleepy popular culture. Anger's curdling inflections and class animosities were echoed in the plays of Joe Orton and Edward Albee (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a direct descendant), in Dennis Potter's savage TV scripts and in a generation of performers, from...