Talk, words and dialogue

Some people's responses are brief in words but elaborate in significance, like the Oracle of Delphi to which Creon goes to bring word to Oedipus. Men talk elaborately but with little significance, whereas the gods speak briefly but with abundant significance. Rejoicing his inspiration to compose cantos, says Ezra Pound: "The gods are back. They haven't left us"
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"Where're you, boys, the woods are burnin'."
"Where's the old spirit?"
The two quotations above are from Miller's Death of a Salesman which I saw in London, late July 2005, under Robert Falls's direction, starring Brian Dennehy as Willy Loman. Ruby Cohn whom I had met at her London studio a couple of days before I went to see the play, advised me against seeing it as she had seen it and didn't like it. I went to see the play with my head full of the way Lee J Cobb speaks Willy's part on Caedmon Records. For me as on Caedmon Records, and for those who saw the play on stage under the direction of Elia Kazan, Cobb was the definitive Willy. In 1949, when Cobb flew all the way from Beverley Hills to New York City after having read the script, he arrived and said to Kazan and Miller, "I am the man", exactly as that negro actor to play O'Neill's Emperor Jones who said, "I am the man. That Irishman [O'Neill] only wrote the play." In his autobiography, Time Bends, Miller gives a wonderful account of the episode of how Cobb was discovered to play Willy.
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In Durrenmatt's der besuch der alten dame (The Visit) Karla Zachanasian is one of my favourite characters as in this dialogue with Anton, the couple is like Elizabeth and Lord Essex, dining and wining on eve of Essex's execution which Elizabeth had ordered and could have stopped but tragic necessity is stronger than human capability, likewise, Karla couldn't stop Anton's execution as much as she loves him

Karla: I will have you killed then taken to Capri in a coffin to be buried in the lawn in front of my dining room so that I look at your grave every morning when I am having breakfast

Anton: Capri! I always wanted to be there