Word: deathwatchers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...cell-society that Deathwatch portrays, the leading position among the three isolated cellmates is held by the murderer Green Eyes. He can control the other two by physical force; and the vague but dense tissue of hints toward homosexual relationships which is woven in the dialogue, indicates that they are rivals for him. Much is made of the fact that the guard is his friend (strange, that these avowed criminals should value so highly the favor of the only non-criminal character in the play). This guard brings him cigarettes in token of amity from Snowball, a savage Negro convict...
...comes from myself," Lefranc retorts. But it is the last in a long series of his empty boasts. In the words of Maurice just before he is killed, "... Green Eyes is the one who's got to suffer... The one who's been chosen." Lefranc cannot choose himself. Deathwatch is a criminal scripture, preaching damnanation not by bad works but by Divine (or Satanic) Election...
...play's prison-cell setting is not only the pulpit for the exposition of Genet's peculiar theology. Our emotional involvement with Deathwatch comes from regarding it as a play about three men locked together closely enough so that the personality of each has the maximum opportunity to work subtly upon the others; three men racked with egotistic and homosexual tensions, preying upon each other's nerves, and driving each other towards explosions of verbal and physical violence which culminate in murder...
...virtue of this psychological quality that Deathwatch is a drama and not a philosophic dialogue. Genet is a skillfull dramatist, and he is well served in the present production...
...director Leo Garen had other plans. He has given us, as Stephen Aaron did in Cambridge, a vigorous, straightforward, realistic, Methodical performance. Genet is much interested in the nature and relationship of illusion and reality; his idea of a dream-Deathwatch probably has something to do with this hobby of his. It is a dangerous hobby, however, likely to lead an author into arid jiggery-pokery. Probably both directors were wise in refusing to sacrifice to it the excitement we derive from watching people act and suffer onstage, rather than dream-phantoms. A proudction directed along Genet's lines might...