Word: da
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Irish Playwright Hugh Leonard is a kind of family doctor among contemporary dramatists. He probes the aches and pain of a lifetime. Drumm (Roy Dotrice), the unheroic hero of A Life, whom we first met in Leonard's "Da, " is an aging civil servant with razor-blade lips and a cut tingly witty tongue. He is dying of cancer, and what he finds out in this play is that he has squandered his life by suppressing...
...thoroughly hated, and always interrupted by some stroke of wit or humour ... so far from writing, [he] scarcely ever read a book-but, for a letter to an intimate friend, he had few equals." He loved music, and entertained his friends by playing the harpsichord and the viola da gamba. "Liberal, thoughtless, and dissipated," he called himself, and admired (without particularly envying it) the application of sturdier and more evenminded talents like that of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the president of the Royal Academy. "Painting & Punctuality mix like Oil & Vinegar," he reflected...
Death, of course, is life's largest irony. Mortality tolled through Leonard's best-known play, "Da "; in Summer it rustles through the sunlit grass on a verdant hilltop near Dublin. The year is 1968, and three middle-aged couples rendezvous for a picnic. Food, wine, gossip and nostalgic reminiscences mask tiny tremors of apprehension and isolation...
...particularly unpleasant feature of life is what the Chinese call qiang xing da pei, or forced distribution. It means simply that if one wants to buy a particular "item in a store, the clerk, who is eager for a productivity bonus, may insist on the purchase of an additional, slower-moving item as well...
...curiousity for centuries succeeds in transcending the limits of arrogance set in his first two books. If he had something thoughtful to say, Robbins might be pardoned for relegating fiction to the role of facade for his musings. But the container he constructs with his la-dee-da plot and plaster-mold characters cannot bear the weight of his philosophical spoutings. The ideas strain to be released until the storyline can no longer bear the pressure, and at the end of the novel the bottom falls...