...Wagstaff, enduring contribution was to create extracts from spoof critical reviews for use in the program(me). The line that gained the best response ran as follows:

"Makes Moses and Aron look like the Headmasters' Conference."

Now, while most VERBATIM readers can probably guess that the conference of headmasters (principals) from Britain's leading independent schools was, and remains, rather staid and decorous affair, the reference to the Schoenberg opera may not be immediately familiar to them. To a callow teenager in 1960s England, however, Moses and Aron represented a frisson of excitement, and the allusion would have been familiar to most people. The performance of the opera has been described by the Sunday Times as "the notoriously scandalous 1965 Covent Garden production, directed by Sir Peter Hall and conducted by Solti." Further, "Despite the controversy surrounding the sacrifice of four naked virgins at the climax of the golden-calf episode--or perhaps because of it--the Hall production was only revived once, in 1966." (1) What had this to do with an amateur, even amateurish, production of Dry Rot? Well, both works were performed on stage, and the positioning of the farce as something more scandalous than the opera, while suggesting a closer link between the opera and the conference, comprised a rhetorical device that I like to call the "hyperbolic contrast."

The model for my simile was the famous review of Alan Sillitoe's gritty novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning:

"A novel of today, with a freshness and raw fury that makes Room at the Top look like a vicarage tea-party." (2) Room at the Top was another earthy novel about passion in the North of England, an area that had hitherto not received its share of the literary limelight, written by another of the "Angry Young Men," (3) John Braine.

Hence the allusion to the demure tea-parties associated more with drawing-room comedies of the previous generation. The gap in tone between the two works was in fact slender, hyperbolic contrast being used to intensify the...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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