He taught us that, in the face of atrocity and tragedy, morality can prevail; that knowledge and truth are vital in the battle against ignorance and intolerance; and that the word refugee need not be unpopular.
In the third act, Franz's fresh-faced fiancee (Ludivine Sagnier) and Leo's old flame (Anna Thomson), possibly a transsexual, drop in on the scene, and the movie slides from soigne sex farce into orgy, musical, tragedy and morality play.
After two acts of Leo and Franz, "Water Drops on Burning Rocks" invites Anna (Ludivine Sagnier), Franz's loyal, fresh-faced fiancee, and Vera Annaa Thomson, Leoo's possibly transsexual old flame, into the previously all-male love nest, and the movie seamlessly slides from soigne sex farce into orgy, musical, tragedy and morality play.
It incarnates a victory of "style" over "content," "aesthetics" over "morality," of irony over tragedy".
In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy, from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent of Shakespeare.
Perhaps we should get rid of the old association of tragedy with high morality and be content to think that, since we are human, a certain sadism is involved in the pleasure it gives.
The Murder of Gonzago is an old-fashioned, rhetorical, bombastic tragedy, structured like a morality play, beginning with a dumb show and filled with stiff formal speeches.
HBO's Monday night documentary series, an oasis of seriousness and intelligence among the mostly mindless diversions of the summer television season, offers a combination of mystery, morality play and almost unbearable family tragedy in "THERE'S SOMETHING WRONG WITH AUNT DIANE" (9 p.m. Monday).
If the accused priests had lived up to the church's teachings on sexual morality, we would not have this human tragedy, for which penance and reparation must be made.
That fact makes it trickier and more ambitious — a morality play, with top notes of Greek tragedy, which remains purposefully coy about its morality.
