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Duerrenmatt's The Visit of the Old Lady
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 November 2021
Extract
In his presentation of the twentieth-century world and Everyman, Duerrenmatt uses a form as old as Greek tragedy and a staging method as modern as surrealism; he uses characters as old as the Sphinx in combination with our contemporaries, Eisenhower and Nehru; and in his stage business, he uses motifs as old as Oedipal inspired fears of castration, dark, mysterious, and frighteningly uncontrollable, and motifs as new, as light, as explicable as the operation of The-Place-in-the-Sun Foundry and the economics of a simple local grocery store. This total presentation he makes with an artistry before which the imagination, even of an imaginative critic, boggles; for with a gorgeously simple style and technique, Duerrenmatt's dramatic lines achieve the stylization of poetry, and move from poetry to myth, where the complex of thought, passion, and affect become infinitely expansible, indefinitely relevant, and meaningful without apparent limit.
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- Copyright © The Tulane Drama Review 1961
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