Word: zachanassian
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This old and unreliable cliché remains in vogue precisely because it is a comfort to the cynically inert conscience. Why risk a moral stance if evil, greed and calculated self-interest will invariably win out? Win they certainly do in The Visit. Clara Zachanassian (Rachel Roberts), a middle-aging, much-married multimillionairess, has come back to her impoverished home town of Gullen with a rather special proposition. She will bestow half a billion marks on the town and another half a billion to be divided equally among its citizens in return for what might be called Salome...
...exchange for the life of one man, now a local merchant, who seduced her when she was 17, left her pregnant and dishonored after hiring perjurers to testify to her lewdness. "The world made me a whore; now I will turn the world into a brothel," declares Madame Zachanassian. When the horrified villagers reject her offer, she smiles coolly: "I can wait...
...then denied before a court of law that he was responsible. As a result she was forced to leave town, 17 years old and seven months pregnant. Starting as a prostitute, she married nine rich men in a row to become the richest woman in the world. Now, Claire Zachanassian, nee Washer, has returned to the little town to buy justice and revenge: she offers the one billion in return for her childhood lover's life...
Playing opposite Medearis, who is wonderful, is Lynn Milgrim as the old lady, and Miss Milgrim is even better. She handles her complex part with the versatility that Claire Zachanassian's changing mods require. Her role is the central one in the play: Miss Milgrim must be comic in one scene, tragic in the next, and tragicomic the rest of the time. She moves from being old and bitchy to being sad and tender with astonishing ease. The scene in the forest when she sits with Medearis who knows he will die that night is the most moving...
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...