Word: tragic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...answer, as interpreted by actors such as Paul Scofield and the late Louis Calhern, is that the seeds of madness have always lain dormant in Lear, ready at the slightest pretext to sprout. But Carnovsky has a more mordant and, in many ways, a more tragic view. Lear, he contends, is everyman; his disasters are everyman's and the tragedy in Shakespeare's eye "is not in Lear himself, but in life." When Carnovsky's Lear, reeling like a wounded animal, howls forth
Although Carnovsky is not a large man (5 ft. 9 in., 165 Ibs.) he dominates the stage at Stratford with such extraordinary passion that the rest of the cast seems physically small by comparison. "I grew up with an inherited sense of the tragic, a sense of loss," he says. Whatever sense of tragedy he may have got from his impoverished childhood in St. Louis, he must feel a sense of high achievement in Connecticut. For night after night he sends his Stratford audiences home in tears...
...more amiable view of the battle of the sexes being portrayed on the Main Stage. Shaw could smile resignedly at the tenacity with which woman fulfilled her duty to the Life Force and captured a husband. Strindberg brooded over the plague of women besetting man, and saw tragic disaster in the marriage woman sought. In both plays though, there is a great deal of talk...
...stage is not the representative of the Life Force, the pursuer who must necessarily conquer John Tanner to achieve motherhood; and John Tanner (but some of this is Shaw's doing) is not the artist who must remain free to give the Life Force meaning and whose entrapment is tragic...
...truth. He recoiled both from Communism's dictation of how man should behave and from the nihilistic insistence that it did not matter how man behaved. He clung to a faith in the individual man, seeking a formula through which a man could live happily within his tragic limitations without surrendering either to collectivism or to despair...