Word: urrenmatt
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...foyer of the splashy, freshly decorated new Lunt-Fontanne Theater, champagne flowed at intermissions for white-tied first nighters. But onstage, the gifted Lunts offered not their usual sparkling comedy but a dour drama about man's injustice to man, by fast-rising Swiss Playwright Friedrich Düurrenmatt. The Visit, says TIME'S review, is "as incredible and surrealist, yet as bluntly precise and compelling, as a dream." See THEATER...
...Visit brought the Lunts to Broadway-for a rumored final visit to Broadway-in a theater piece of strikingly acrid power. Adapted by Maurice Valency from the German of Swiss Playwright Friedrich Düurrenmatt, The Visit begins in light colors and comedy guise, suddenly to darken the face of its canvas, to blacken the hearts of its characters. A grisly fable of a woman's vengeful hate, it shows a whole community relentlessly succumbing to greed...
Something comparably cynical in tone, and in spots even similar in treatment, went into Mark Twain's The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg. But Düurrenmatt's tale of the woman who corrupted Gullen is more eerily sinister. In Madame Zachanassian, with her entourage-pet panther, youthful eighth husband, blinded perjurers. American gangsters-are the all-too-obvious symbols of a ruthless, degenerate world. Moreover, it was Claire herself who carefully reduced Gullen to poverty as a prelude to tempting it; and her revenge seems directed almost as much on the town that witnessed her shame...
...clergyman and grandson of a well-known Swiss satiric poet, Düurrenmatt turned to drama after studying philosophy at the universities of Bern and Zurich. He settled in Neuchatel "because I wanted to be alone, far away from friends who would constantly call on me, hampering my work...
...lover of Shakespeare and Greek drama, Düurrenmatt regards himself as a cynical realist, but adds: "I am not one of those who have lost all hope. Cynicism does not mean bitterness. If a situation is described in a cruel manner, it does not necessarily mean the author is bitter...
| 1 |