Word: spieltrieb
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...knock it, for when it is good, Lulu is as good as anything the Rep has yet put on. The staging is continuously engaging and visually interesting, the technical effects are never gratuitous, and always surprising; throughout, there's a contagious joy in theatre, a constant thread of spieltrieb, of play and wit and imagination. For example, there's the spontaneous appearance in the first half of a rock band, led by the preternaturally cool Steve Drury, on a podium that rises out of the stage. They are having fun, and the fun draws us in, which is showmanship...
...when the explosion of tradition and the routini- zation of expression coincide, when the scenery falls down, the audience packs up, and all dialogue, even the best, reduces itself to threatening, because patterned, gibberish, the quality of dramatic action becomes infected by a kind of eccentric Spieltrieb, the aesthetic play of the "humorous" cripple. To act upon the assumptions of a rejected humanism is tonic, or at least good for kick, and wry glimpses of a hypothetical salvation may still be achieved in the pick-up bed. This is the mother vein of romantic irony, clowning in the densely-populated...
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