Eve Tushnet’s review of the Shakespeare Theatre production of Noel Coward’s Design for Living is up at the American Spectator.
The play’s us-vs.-them shtik always had something unpleasant about it, as in the servant-problem humor in which working-class characters exist solely as comic outsiders. But when Gilda’s lovers return, to find that her fear-born marriage has made her hardened and cynical, they casually swoop in to rescue her from the clutches of a husband who loves her deeply. Ernest has decisively become one of “them.” And he accepts this role, ranting about the degeneracy of the trio, as they cruelly delineate his helplessness in the face of their determined eros. In the final moment of the play, Ernest stomps off like Malvolio, pompous and utterly humiliated, as the three lovers intertwine on the couch and laugh their pretty heads off.
…
The laughter as cruelty interpretation weakens the play in one way: it becomes less challenging to the audience if the characters who articulate the consequences of the liberal eros lo volt! mindset are personally unsympathetic. The director may have intended to draw the audience into complicity with the lovers’ selfishness — and in fact, I was surprised at how long it took for the audience to stop laughing at Ernest, to lose their edgy sympathy for the lovers — but the ultimate effect was simply to make the lovers’ erotic demands seem further from our own.
Emphasis mine. I’d love to see a brief history of American culture which took as its turning points the moments at which the works of notable satirists and shock artists were played straight and accepted without irony.
June 25th, 2009 | 10:18 am
Interesting notion. I doubt we’ll see one anytime soon though. Unless of course someone blogs about it…
June 26th, 2009 | 12:21 am
Before the First Things website opened itself up to commenters and postmodernists and other such rabble, they posted a comparison of two New York Times reviews of A Man for All Seasons. In ’61 it was praised to high heaven; in 2008, we get this:
And then, just a few weeks ago, this blasphemy (Up was a damn good movie, by the way):
It’s something like the converse of what Tushnet notes in our reception of Coward’s play. Just as the audience had no trouble interpreting as straight what was meant as satire, that wretch of a Times reviewer couldn’t take seriously wholesome scenes presented without any snark.
June 26th, 2009 | 1:19 pm
Hmm… “modernity as disordering of irony”. Sounds promising, I may have to chew on that.
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