Word: sophoclean
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Come Back, Orestes. Young Orestes, in The Return, is not the man his Sophoclean namesake was. Unlike Clytemnestra. his mother has not killed her husband; she has merely taken up with a fake faith healer while her soldier-husband is missing in war. Her house has become a near-brothel and a hangout for all sorts of scurvy types. To Eugenia, the latter-day Electra, hating her mother's vulgarity and unfaithfulness, life is agony. Their violent quarrels have become a way of life, to be ended, Eugenia believes, only when Brother Orestes comes back from the university...
...Tragedy," says the Chorus of Jean Anouilh's Antigone, "is clean"--but the play itself belies this. For Anouilh, writing in 1944, the filth of politics and administration seemed more real than the antiseptic heroics of Sophoclean tragedy. Like the Frenchmen of the day his Thebans are all preoccupied with authority and sordid disorder, a preoccupation intensified in the English language version by Lewis Galantiere's consistent use of rough American slang...
...soul who cares not at all that dealers are finding French art increasingly scarce might try his hand at figuring out what happened to the painter's geist in Germany since the days of Durer and Chranach. It may well turn out to be a tragedy in the best Sophoclean tradition...
...plain, impatient critic has found his preoccupations morbid. The stories assembled in this volume, and the longer novels, Victory, Nostromo and Under Western Eyes, make both these accusations seem as irrelevant as the "dating" of Conrad's work. Neither time nor fashion really affects its nature, which is Sophoclean and tragic: "The plight of the man on whom life closes down...
...Antigone of Anouilh, unswayed by religion, unfond of her brother, and in love with life, can only be accounted a fanatical idealist-a character into whom Katharine Cornell finds it almost impossible to breathe life. On the other hand, Anouilh's Creon is at once the least Sophoclean and the most successful person in the play. He is an astute, cynical worldling whose decree is merely a sop to the crowd and whose desire is to save his niece's life; and he is played with chilling elegance by Sir Cedric Hardwicke. If Antigone has ethics...