Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1993. [Vol. 1.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 21)

STUDIES - Péter Egri: From the British Grotesque To the American Absurd: the Dramatist's Dilemma

time it is also repetitively ritualistic,

3

1 it expresses quick and abrupt changes of mood from tender feelings to savage disagreement, and it may lead to sheer absurdity, as it does in Richard's emphatic statement to Jenny: "You're up to hock in your eyebrows ... (.Realizes what he has said, tries to fix it, retaining dignity) ... up in hock to your ... in hock up to your eyebrows, and why!"

3

2 Undercutting pathos by bathos and quarrelling in patterned "rounds" relativize the difference between sense and nonsense, raise the Strindbergian element from a thematic to a formal level, and create a dramatic atmosphere of conversational absurdity which is latent in Strindberg's The Dance of Death and becomes overt in Diirrenmatt's wittily parodistic Play Strindberg or Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The dialogue in Albee's Everything in the Garden uses the element of absurdity not to destroy but to modernize Cooper's traditional style and naturalisticrealistic tradition in general. In this it is different from Beckett's grimly grotesque and ingeniously patterned buffoonery. The simultaneity of maintaining and transforming naturalistic-realistic tradition can also be observed in the relationship of Cooper's and Albee's stage directions not only at the start but throughout the two plays, and especially in the later phases of presenting the conflict. Cooper, as a rule, uses descriptive stage instructions. His procedure corresponds to the deterministic importance he attributes to the external conditions of human action. Albee, to a certain extent, keeps the descriptive element, but, in a considerable degree, also relativizes and modifies it. His technique is in keeping with his dramatic concept of delayed determinism and playful absurdity. Accordingly, Albee's stage instructions are sometimes short key phrases indicating a change of attitude by a playfully pretended change of person. When Richard feels he is going to hate the party, he is simply referred to as "Little boy

;'.

3

3 The instruction plays a part. It can also speak and warn ("Not in front ofRoger") 3

4 it can combine an emotional state and a colloquial inference (" Naked and embarrassed, but if you're in a nudist 3

1 E. Albee, Everything in the Garden, p. 18. 3

2 Ibid., p. 16. Cf. pp. 18, 19, 22,111—3,118,135,143. 3

3 Ibid., p. 128. 3

4 Ibid., p. 127. 37