Word: comprehend
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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What is fascinating is to see a man who is introduced as almost a parody of the chauvinistic mode brought to a near-adolescent state in which increasingly erratic behavior is determined by vio lent waves of emotion that he cannot comprehend, let alone control. At one point he is found trying to enlist his child (no more than six or seven years old) to plead the cause of reconciliation with her mother. A moment later he is marrying a vaguely pleasant young English woman, and a moment after that he is arranging to meet his former wife accidentally...
...hard to comprehend why it required three writers to do this screenplay, when any reasonably bright nine-year-old could have managed it. The story is the stuff of convention: get some innocents (a mother and two children) captured by some baddies (in this case lunatic political terrorists) and sequestered where they are rescue-proof by conventional means (a deserted monastery on top of an isolated peak). The whole idea is to make an improbable -and cinematically novel-rescue gimmick a logical necessity, and in this the scriveners succeed...
...limited to any one social class--are as valid as ever, much of the play's humor derives from specific references to 18th century mores that are necessarily dated. To be sure, high class ladies still affect airs and politicians are still crooks, but we no longer comprehend Gay's jabs at Walpole and his ministers, nor do we have as much patience with the constant appellation of every woman as "hussy" or "slut". Not, for that matter, is The Beggar's Opera any longer completely successful as a musical parody of Italian opera, since the popular ballads that comprise...
...critic dubbed The Blacks "A white man's idea of Negroes' ideas of white ideas of Negroes." The enormous complexity of action and meaning renders Genet's play almost impossible to stage effectively, and even harder to comprehend at one sitting. Diverse audience interpretation stands as a testament not so much to the broad range of Genet's material as to its failure as pure theater. The current word on this literary-intellectual exercise maintains that The Blacks concerns not so much racial schism as the general violence and absurdity of the modern world. This theory nicely dilutes Genet...
...Andreas has the richness of voice that one associates with opera-and, alas, some of the same crimped acting range. She is a more warm-blooded woman than Julie Andrews, but considerably less of a flower girl or a lady. Perhaps it is difficult for an American actress to comprehend either. But like a windjammer, Shaw's imagination sails past all obstacles...