Word: dionysiac
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Beyond the screen, more sake and the music of the samisen. In the courtyard, a ring of dancing girls, stomping about like Dionysiac butterflies under the gaze of their fellow workers on the balcony; and on the left, the bathhouse and the assignation room, where a girl in a bronze-colored robe exhibits one pale, abstract thigh with an air of consummate indifference, while the open door behind her discreetly indicates that her client has just left. Like other screens in the show, this one reminds us that - despite the wonders of democracy and industrial growth - the quality of life...
...profound presentation. That madness may be better than sanity--who are we, who have never known true madness, to judge--goes back as far as you want to take it into Western thought. What Equus does is make it into good theater. Shaffer's play is propaganda for the Dionysiac element in human nature, with a rhetorical impact that outweighs its criticism of psychiatric assumptions. Shaffer doesn't take the extreme position of many modern playwrights, that madness is better than sanity; he only goes so far as to say that madness might be better than sanity, in some cases...
...play affects one's confidence in psychiatrists in nearly the same way as, say, Z affected one's confidence in the Greek judicial system) go deeper. Psychiatry isn't only a soul-crimping technique for the repression of man's purest, strongest experiences. Shaffer sets up the Apollonian and Dionysiac sides of man in bald opposition. He weighs the comparison by opposing a hygienic professional without strong sexual drives (whose chief pleasure is paging through coffee-table books about ancient Greece) to a barely literate whirlwind of adolescent lust. Strang worships his horse-god every night and knows that...
...very small) never goes beyond the verbal stage. Sometimes, particularly in the opening scene of the bonfire with which the town welcomes the spring, there is a hint of menace, but these hints are always resolved into a joke. Fellini shows us only one side of the dionysiac, and only avoids getting sappy as a Christmas card by making his all-encompassing benevolence bittersweet. The director's old persona as the Hitchcock or Resnais or Welles who set out to terrify or bewilder or impress his audience is replaced by kindly old Father Christmas figures like Fellini and Jean Renoir...
...have to appear before the incorruptible judge, Dionysus,"-the Greek god of ecstasy, intoxication and madness, the deus ex machina of all the highs. Nietzsche even imagined the scene: "How cadaverous and ghostly the 'sanity' " of all the obsolescent rationalists will appear as "the intense throng of Dionysiac revelers sweeps past them." That day, in all its mixed exhilaration and despair, seems near...