On the simplest level, Zastrozzi is an outrageous melodrama.  But there's something more deadly urgent here.  And it's that something which makes the play linger in the mind's eye, long after the final incidents have passed.

Zastrozzi stakes out its own exact place in the history of Western Europe.  Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the modern era is struggling to be born.  Zastrozzi is already a figure out of his time.  He comes on like some medieval nightmare, wielding his sword and dagger as though they were still the most lethal weapons on earth.  His attitude is mercilessly aristocratic.  His foe is the new middle class with its shiny new liberal education and its fancy for art.  He is out to annihilate the whole of culture and morality:  "It is my responsibility to spread out like a disease and purge.  And by destroying everything make everything safe...  Alive.  Untouched by expectation.  Free of history.  Free of everything."

This man lives totally outside the moral system.  He is an appalling creature, and his domination is all the more disturbing because it runs entirely counter to all the accepted notions of Western culture.  The main thing about Zastrozzi is that he always wins.  His pride is never punished, by god or man.  Mediocrity must be punished - and Zastrozzi is there, to do it with style.  And to add insult to injury, he resurrects that unfashionable virtue called "discipline" to explain his power to make us answerable.

So, in fact, the moral issues are shoved right out of the play.  What's in question is our own perception of the action.  In the end it's a fascination with the inmost workings of evil which fires the play.

Zastrozzi: The Master of Discipline

Walker, George F.

Playwrights Co-op

George F. Walker's Criminals in love

Playwrights Canada

Humor & Entertainment

Playwrights Canada Press

The Power Plays

Literature & Fiction

Dramas & Plays

Coach House Pr

Nothing Sacred, which is included in the collection Somewhere Else, is a compassionate examination of the roots of nihilism, first defined in Turgenev's novel, Fathers and Sons. And who but George Walker could cast this compassion as grounded in the audaciously absurd drama of impossibly contradictory sensibilities?

Nothing Sacred: Based on Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

Talonbooks, Ltd.

Love and Anger

Escape from Happiness

Shared Anxiety: Selected Plays (Beyond Mozambique, Zastrozzi, Theatre of the Film Noir, The Art of War, Criminals in Love, Better Living, Escape From Happiness, Tough!

Something completely different from George Walker! Six plays, united only by the fact that they each take place in one and the same suburban motel room. Transients, lovers, the haunted and the hunted, the desperate and the dumb, each strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard of no more.” Real, funny and heartbreaking. With an introduction by Daniel De Raey.Suburban Motel contains six plays: Problem Child, Criminal Genius, Risk Everything, Adult Entertainment, Featuring Loretta and The End of Civilization.

Suburban Motel

Somewhere Else contains George F. Walker’s own selection of his early plays which matter; which for him have stood the test of time; which represent, as he once said, his classical veneer.” In them he honed his considerable and unique dramatic talent along that fine line between the serious and the comic,” in settings outside the North American locales of his work since the 1980s. Walker’s earliest plays, absurdist dramas reminiscent of Ionesco and Beckett, climaxed with Beyond Mozambique (1974), featuring a B-movie jungle locale populated by a drug-addicted, pederastic priest, a disgraced Mountie, a porn-film starlet and a demonic ex-Nazi doctor whose wife thinks she is Olga in Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Zastrozzi (1977), utilizing all the baroque conventions of Jacobean tragedy, pits its protagonist, a self-styled, Machiavellian Master of Discipline” against the chaos of the universe in a flurry of dramatic excesses that tend toward elegant self-parody. The Chalmers Award-winning Theatre of the Film Noir (1981), a murder mystery set in wartime Paris, is the culmination of his work in the Humphrey Bogart / Raymond Chandler style, so evident in his trilogy featuring the cynical investigative reporter / private-eye, Tyrone Power. The Governor General’s and Chalmers Award-winning Nothing Sacred (1988), an adaptation of Turgenev’s novel, Fathers and Sons, consolidated his popular reputation outside of Canada to such a degree that the Los Angeles Times declared it the play of the year.”

Somewhere Else

Talonbooks

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Books by Walker, George F.