Word: shocker
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Kitchen. British Playwright Arnold Wesker's socialist shocker clatters, boils and roars its way through a day in the help's half of a big London restaurant. As dialectic it may be flimsy, but as theater it is a feast...
...Kitchen (A.C.T. Films; Kingsley) is a socialist shocker-socialist because the kitchen in question is a ferocious attack on what's left of the profit system in Britain, a shocker in the sense that a steaming tureen of stew is a shocker when flung full in a customer's face. Adapted from a play by Arnold Wesker, a soapbox socialist and onetime pastry cook who at 29 is currently the fashionable prole among Britain's angry young dramatists. The Kitchen describes with stupendous drive a day in the help's half of a big London restaurant...
When Strauss's shocker, with its violent, passionate score and its scenes of perverted eroticism, first burst on the public consciousness in 1905, it scared the censors out of their frock coats and orchestras half out of their pits. The one-act opera was banned in Berlin, Vienna, London and New York. Even Soprano Marie Wittich, who appeared in the title role at the world premiere in Dresden, threatened for a time to withdraw because "I am a decent woman...
...Benjamin Britten was over tempted to build an opera, on Henry James's unattractive little post-Gothic and pre-Freudian shocker, The Turn of the Screw, I confess I cannot easily conceive: James's novella, I have always thought, could only be dramatized by someone experienced in the nuances of psychological muck--a writer of the Grand Guignol, say, or perhaps even Mr. Alfred Hitchcock...
Author Murdoch's intelligence, both as critic and novelist (The Flight from the Enchanter, The Sandcastle), is above question. But this sophisticated shocker seems to have little point beyond the homely moral that those who think life would be simpler without moral rules are very simple indeed. Also, the great uncouched majority may well find food for the suspicion that-in some hands-psychiatry may involve demonological matters leading not to a liberation of the mind but to some thing closer to a witches' Sabbath...