Word: rubashov
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...internal-combustion engine, not by invention but by refinement. The modern subtlety is the obscene symbiosis in which interrogator and victim cooperate willingly in an elaborate pretense of the victim's guilt. And the basic document of this condition is the long dialogue between Rubashov and Gletkin in Koestler's Darkness at Noon...
What is horrifying about the Koestler novel is that the reader becomes convinced that in Rubashov's place he himself would become a complying victim. Anyone in the 20th century can become a victim; that needs no further proof. But a further evil is possible, Irish Writer Victor Price argues in this thoughtful first novel. What Price suggests is that anyone, bound up in the tangled complicities of corrupting power, may become an interrogator. Price's hero is Hugh Barbour, a classicist who escapes from his academic hide-hole into a job interrogating Greek prisoners for the British...
Ronald Coralian, who is surely one of the College's best actors, gives a relentlessly taut performance as Rubashov, doomed. He plays with conviction and never moves away from the heart of a long and great part. Sharon Connolley, the bourgeois temptation who is a symbol of the humanity that he finds foreign to the Party, succeeds in conveying simplicity in a very complex world; she has a presence. William Noble, in the role of 402 who occupies the cell next to Rubashov, plays with primitive charm and excitement. Alfred Bakhash, another prisoner, presents a remarkable caricature in the first...
Travis Linn and David Pursley, as Ivanov and Gletkin respectively, seem physically very young for their imposing roles as interrogators of Rubashov. Pursley's Indoor Athletic Building haircut perhaps gives the impression in his case. But both act with ease and are reasonable representations of Party hacks...
...good deal simpler and more sinister than what Koestler imagined. The 1949 show trial of Hungary's Communist Foreign Minister Laszlo Rajk read as if it had been taken from Koestler's pages. Apparently for reasons of party unity, Rajk, like Koestler's Rubashov, confessed in court to treasonable deviation. But no relentless interrogator was needed to persuade Rajk to confess. The job was done by Rajk's friend Janos Kadar, now the puppet Premier of Hungary...