Word: slapsticks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Actors Company staging of Knots wraps an hour's worth of such vicious circular logic in music hall routines that include slapstick, songs, juggling, mime and dance. Ironically, the format runs into a Laingian knot or two. The words cannot satisfy the action, which in turn fails to satisfy the words. The reason is that Laing's knots are not truly Gordian but slip; what appears complex comes apart with a simple tug. This may even be the point, but it still leaves the actors-none of whom are Laurel or Hardy, or Gallagher & Shean-striving frantically...
...scene is funny, and Mostel is at his absurd best, the scene is just too long and gimmicky. O'Horgan's determination to make the play a conventional comedy ruins the scene. It's always fun to exploit Mostel's talent. But long comic scenes which rely on conventional slapstick devices and stock audience responses have no place in Theater of the Absurd. Slapstick comedy is part of the audience's comfortable and familiar world which Theater of the Absurd sets out to shatter...
...movie, which is divertingly diabolical, is the work of Pietro Germi, who once again (as in Divorce, Italian Style) makes social slapstick out of Italian law. Hoffman appears as a shy bank clerk whose beautiful wife (Stefania Sandrelli) floods him with killing affection. She is an embarrassment at the table, where she delights in sucking fish heads, and in bed, where she screams like an air-raid siren during orgasm. Months of this kind of married life, plus a hysterical pregnancy and intrusive in-laws, are enough to drive Hoffman into the arms of another woman (Carla Gravina). Hoffman...
...School fixation or not, there's no unity at all to 'the production--the tenuous Watergate connection, for example, is milked for all it's worth so that everything's thrown in. Sometimes the scatter-shot technique worked--there was a sense of absurdity and a liberal sprinkling of slapstick that occasionally legitimized the mess. Some of the music--especially when the score departed from the safe, cliched, quasi-forties style--like Laura Shapiro's mediocre "Onion," was completely out of context. The song could have been in any show, and should have been in none...
...only failing in this excellent production of Pinafore is the gimmickry. During the Lord Admiral's attempt to woo Josephine, director Lindsay Davis inserts some unnecessary slapstick which detracts from the Gilbert humor. Dick Deadeye (Phillip Baas) does not wear the usual eyepatch but sports instead a "dead eye" which, from the balcony, looks like a wart. He is also equipped with a hook for a left hand...