Word: playwrights
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...made to specify some individual responsibility for crimes, oppressions, injustices, and atrocities, the dominating j'accuse is hurled at the audience. The audience is presumed to be collectively guilty of every misdeed in recorded history. This is patently absurd. By embracing the abstraction of collective guilt, the playwright performs the singularly irresponsible act of absolving the specifically guilty parties involved...
What, then, does such a playwright think he is doing? His rationale is that he is providing a cautionary moral lesson drawn from history that will enable people to avoid past errors and evils. Unfortunately, the profoundly ironic lesson of history is that people do repeat the errors and evils of the past, over and over and over again. The reality these playwrights ignore is that man is a finite being, bound always to act and react within the limits of his nature, "a fallen creature" in religious terms. If the human character could be altered and improved...
Another rationale such playwrights resort to is that they are alerting the audience's conscience to contemporary evils. Far from it. These playwrights simply trade on the headlines of the day and gamble that the people they attract will come to the theater precisely because their consciences are on the alert. There is nothing easier than to preach to the already converted. For any but a guilt-collecting audience, most of these plays rate a big B for Boredom. There is no moral suasion in crude hack work that substitutes lapel-grabbing diatribes for scrupulous dramatic craftsmanship. A poor...
Paralyzed by Inadequacy. This is where the play actually begins, and the events that follow have resonances of The Homecoming-though Irish Playwright Thomas Murphy's play was produced four years before Pinter's. The brothers make passes at Michael's wife and even suggest using his home as a whorehouse. Michael is faced down, raged at and humiliated by his father, who is a perfect blend of aging bull and undiminished blarney. Michael's wife urges him to stand up for his rights. But he is paralyzed by a nagging sense of masculine inadequacy...
...Carneys are not all bad. They have courage, they are loyal, they tell the truth, insofar as they can see it. Their destiny is not to be evil but to be unable to mobilize and release the good qualities that they have in them. It is the playwright's essential fairness and depth of understanding of this plight that give A Whistle in the Dark its strength, wisdom and broody disconcerting beauty...