Word: upmanships
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...After all, by now just about everyone who visits Israel on similar junkets gets a VIP excursion to the Golan Heights or the Jordan River or Sharm el Sheikh. But, except for last week's 28 lucky fund raisers, how many can come home with the exquisite one-upmanship of the ultimate trip: "How I was captured by the Egyptians during my U.J.A. tour of Israel...
Rather depressing stuff, some may argue. In reality, it is not. This is partly because Storey peppers the play with a fusillade of humor, much of it of the caustic one-upmanship variety at which the British have few equals and no superiors. In The Contractor, as in The Changing Room, Storey reveals himself as a celebrator of communal male effort. The task of playing a rugby game knits the men of The Changing Room together in pleasure and in pain. The task of putting up and taking down the tent in The Contractor is not a stage charade...
...however, is David (Sami Frei), an artist who returns to Paris to pick up with Rosalie where he left off several years ago. David is a reserved and preoccupied figure, languidly handsome, and given to the terse, apocalyptic remarks with which soap opera segments end in mystery. The one-upmanship of the two suitors in their fight for Rosalie is the organizing theme of the early scenes. The camera reveals Cesar and David through her eyes, as she makes mental comparisons, and the tension is akin to that which accompanies long-winded introductions at championship fights. In this corner...
...technical counterpart of this in Coward's plays is that he vastly speeded up the tempo of comedy. Relying on single lines of dialogue, he produced instant repartee in which talk became a blindingly fast game of inflective one-upmanship rather than a declaration of meaning or a display of passion. Even within individual lines, he inserted a word or phrase that mockingly deflated the emotion it expressed. Thus Elyot says to Amanda in Private Lives: "You're looking very lovely in this damned moonlight, Amanda." Repeated time and again, this approach almost makes Coward the granddaddy...
Rafelson peoples his landscape with the misfit fringes of go-ahead America: wheeler-dealers and sham artists, gamblers, petty crooks and rootless wanderers. Though outsiders, they still cherish a belief in Monopoly's promise, winner takes the jackpot. So they circle the board in a frivolous game of one-upmanship, until life sputters out in disillusionment or disaster...