Word: puntila
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Puntila and His Hired Man, unlike Galileo, resembles a journey without a destination. In Brecht, dramatic conflict does not resolve itself in tragedy as a death struggle between good and evil, but in irony as a life struggle between irreconcilable divisions in the human psyche itself...
...Puntila is a wealthy Finnish landowner and a totally different man when drunk than when sober. When drunk, he is generous, kindly, amorous, democratic and the soul of good fellowship. When sober, he is mean, arrogant, priggish and smoldering with hatred for his fellow man. Puntila sober, as Brecht sees it, is a class-conditioned animal. Puntila drunk is Rousseau's child of instinctive natural goodness. Some richly comic scenes pivot on this personality split. Puntila sober wouldn't dream of fraternizing with his chauffeur Matti; Puntila drunk begs Matti to marry his daughter. Puntila drunk gets engaged...
While the Marxist polemics are dated-who keeps servants, anyway?-the psychological tensions of the play are intact. Actor Roger Hamilton is a bristling porker of a Puntila, rutting, grunting and swilling his way through the part, but Michael Fairman's Matti is a trifle too stiff and condescending to be a Sancho Panza foil to this flamboyantly intoxicated Don Quixote...