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Overview
First published as a trilogy in 1986, The Power Plays contain Gossip (1977), Filthy Rich (1979), and The Art of War (1983). Completely revised and updated for this new Talonbooks edition, these three plays showcase both the development and the culmination of Walker’s engagement with the film noir style.
Synopsis
First published as a trilogy in 1986, The Power Plays contain "Gossip" (1977); "Filthy Rich" (1979); and "The Art of War" (1983). Completely revised and updated for this new Talonbooks edition, these three plays showcase both the development and the culmination of Walker's engagement with the film noire style.
Related in theme and mood to "Theatre of the Film Noire" (one of the four plays collected in Somewhere Else), these three plays are not set in Europe, but in North America, and feature a character named Tyrone Power as either an investigative reporter or a private eye. Derived as he is from the Raymond Chandler detective novels and the classic Humphrey Bogart style of laconic cynicism, Walker's Tyrone Power is actually an investigation of the limitations of this kind of mid- 20th Century male ideal, with its origins in countless western movies and its apotheosis the Clint Eastwood character, Dirty Harry. Because this is George Walker at work, the Tyrone Power of these three plays both mocks and transcends by some considerable distance the classic margins of this self-possessed, tough-guy stereotype. In "The Art of War", for example, originally commissioned for a conference on "Art and Reality" at Simon Fraser University, the shabby and almost hapless Power is encamped virtually "powerless" in front of a general turned culture minister and his classic entourage of the vicious bodyguard and the beautiful, femme fatale daughter of a foreign dictator.