The boredom can be as painful for theatre-goers as the stifled hopes and unrealised dreams are for his characters.If moroseness is one way to kill Chekhov, another method, favoured outside Russia, is to turn his plays into stiff drawing-room comedies.
The millennia of oppression, instead of driving the Athenians into obtuse moroseness, have honed their wit and rendered them tough but supple, while centuries of privation have only preserved their warmth and generosity.
Hoffman, a maestro of moroseness, practically shudders with rage in his big confrontation with Daniel: your playing is like your character, he says, "rigid and monotonous and self- loving", and one hears a career's worth of resentment boil over in the words.
Forshaw's thesis is that Nordic Noir springs from a folk soul shaped by a combination of grandly austere landscapes, an inherent tendency to moroseness and, hence, to insecurity about the future for the region's social stability in an era of globalisation.
In a landmark book called "The Great Apes," published in 1929, he said their sullenness, moroseness, or hostility, may turn out to be a mixture of timidity and self-protection.
Then, with his mood alternating between moroseness and defiance, he embarked on a monologue that lasted for more than two hours.
Somewhat indebted to Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven," the Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo displays a near-pathological moroseness and a fierce devotion to symbolism.
A poem called "Sunday" is a prime example, striking a key of moroseness ("I wish I were the proud worms / twisting out of nowhere / to writhe and thrash / as if their god had fulfilled / his promise") that comes dangerously close to self-parody.
Take the royal weddings, then and now, punctuating the moroseness at a 30-year interval.
As Alicia's moroseness and neediness snowballs, you wish one of her tart-tongued friends would unleash with a little tough love.
He is one of the few contemporary musicians to so directly evoke Europe's ambient moroseness, and he does so with an eclecticism that has earned him critical praise.
