Word: tyrant
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...critics was the fact that the Bolshoi's Boris captured not only the barbaric power of the work but also its subtle psychology. At the head of an effective cast, Basso Ivan Petrov projected passion better than pitch, but his booming, dramatically harrowing portrayal of the tormented tyrant was still a triumph...
...friend from the underground days, who now records the despot's lying in state. Frank's secret hobby is building up a huge collection of candid but forbidden photographs: "unsuitable pictures taken from unsuitable angles, the averted face of the world in which [the tyrant] moved, a parade of folly, a riot of vanity, a debauch of cowardice-s a stark naked general dancing the csúrdú among the cakes on a banquet table, a collective orgy of rural bosses...
...well. Blindly, stupidly, they still love him-the discarded wife, the girl friend whose family he once imprisoned, the aging professor whose career he ruined. In fact, Author Mnacko's outrage goes deeper than politics: with Swiftian anger, he condemns the victim as well as the tyrant. As a writer, however, he is no Swift. The novel is at times clumsy and dated: conversations are imagined by the narrator, glances between characters are supposed to be significant enough to stand for a paragraph or so of exposition, flashbacks fly off like the calendar pages in an old movie...
...slightest glimmer of hope left, Macbeth still insists on summoning up his transcendent courage to meet his death with honor. Fine enough, but Houseman carries the idea too far, and the result elicits smiles. Shakespeare specified that Macduff was to kill Macbeth off stage and then enter with the tyrant's head. Instead, we see the entire duel. Macbeth even picks Macduff up and swings him on his shoulders. Macduff while up there pulls out a dagger and stabs Macbeth in the back. But Macbeth is too strong to go down, and several soldiers rush in to pile stabbing upon...
...Creon of Sophocles is a pigheaded, authoritarian tyrant who is absolutely confident of his own infallibility. The Creon of Anouilh-Carnovsky is quite different. We even learn that in his youth "he loved music, bought rare manuscripts, was a kind of art patron." But now he has become the sort of person against whom Archibald MacLeish has just warned us: "Man in the electronic age is not a votary of the arts--he has more serious business. He sees himself, whatever his economic system, as a social and scientific animal, the great unraveler of the universe, its potential master...