Word: playwrighting
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...great dramatic role leads a double life. The outer life is the dialogue, scenes, situations and narrative line that the playwright has bestowed on the play. The inner life is what the actor or actress brings to the play. That is why there have been as many differing Hamlets as there have been actors who have played the part. What makes certain actors great Hamlets is that they invest the role with an inner life of compelling richness, density and power. They risk and spend all that they themselves have learned about life and add it to mighty Shakespeare...
Another mighty playwright, Ibsen, offers an equivalent role for a woman in Hedda Gabler. The sad thing about the current off-Broadway revival is that the inner life that Claire Bloom brings to it is chilly, prim and pallid. The inner life is extremely important to Hedda, for otherwise what is left is the story of a kind of grown-up "bad seed," a woman who out of casual malice or native bitchiness burns her would-be lover's brilliant manuscript, pushes him back to drink and gives him a pistol with instructions to shoot himself...
...extremely interested in meeting Hedda. They want to know about everything that Miss Bloom fails to tell them: the source and force of her unspent passion, of her neurotic boredom, of her worship of her father, of her loathing for her husband and of many other intriguing things. The playwright has given the actress gold, but it lies under dark ground where she must assiduously dig. The degree of angst that Claire Bloom conveys could easily be relieved with a couple of aspirin...
Horovitz, like his fellow members of Pagliacci Incorporated, always seems on the verge of saying something of size and substance but never gets past the verge. When a playwright says nothing that is fresh, deep, strange, poetic or startling about the business of being human, the frustrating irrelevance of the evening seems to cancel out the apparent signs of theatrical promise. Indeed, a shrine might be erected to all of these fledgling dramatists, and their patron saint would be Our Lady of Perpetual Promise...
When one attends a Chekhov play, one does not, strictly speaking, go to the theater. One drops in on life. No stethoscope is needed to detect the heartbeat of existence. Chekhov may be the best imaginable argument for a playwright's having some other occupation...