Word: tyrants
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...Myrta, Queen of the willis, Marie-Christine Mouis is a powerful, ruthless tyrant. She has at her command the entire corps de ballet, a force whose threat stems from their anonymity. The willis are terrifying in their immobility, their lack of individuality and their lack of pity. The corps does admirably with the almost impossible task of moving as one. They transform a group of 16 women into a single deathly, supernatural unit...
...leap from the private wrongdoer--"the poor friend and domestic tyrant"--to the perpetrators of twentieth century evil is the mental gymnastic that underlies the book's analysis Cruelty and its bedfellows, like our private lives, all have public faces...
...following year, four F-5 jet fighters piloted by rebellious air force officers opened fire on Hassan's Boeing 727, destroying the landing gear as well as an engine. Cool as ever, Hassan reportedly took the controls and persuaded his attackers to cease firing by radioing them, "The tyrant is dead. Enough people have died." He expertly landed the craft and, by having his death proclaimed on the radio, flushed out the leaders of the plot...
...result is a grand, sprawling entertainment that incites enthrallment for much of its 2 hr. 38 min. Shaffer's screenplay retains many of the play's epigrammatic fulminations, deftly synopsizes whole sections, transforms Mozart's father from a hectoring apparition to an onscreen tyrant, and provides a thrilling new climax in which the dying Mozart dictates his Requiem to a Salieri racked with guilt, jealousy and awe. If the operatic excerpts occasionally impede dramatic flow, they capture the Mozartian spirit as well as comment, with typical Forman bravura, on the theme of an oaf who makes miracles...
Merging the characters of the manservant and the King's messenger converts the monarch from a protector to a tyrant who will let his citizens suffer to increase their awe and dependence. The change derives from a genuine insight: as Pintilie notes in the program, the play is full of instances of people being spied upon, or believing that they are. Perhaps it takes an East European, schooled in the ways of the surveillance state, to grasp the political implications of that conventional element of farce. But for spectators in the American Midwest, the climactic revelation is perceptibly, persuasively...