常時英心:言葉の森から 1.0

約10年間,はてなダイアリーで英語表現の落穂拾いを行ってきました。現在はAmeba Blogに2.0を開設し,継続中です。こちらはしばらくアーカイブとして維持します。

the hairs rise on the back of one's neck

The Guardianの大物劇評家のMichael Bilingtonのエッセイから英語表現を拾います。今回も読み応えのある記事で劇における「観客の恐怖心をあおる仕掛け」について書かれています。最後のパラグラフで「オチ」が書かれているのも面白い記事です。

さて、赤字で示したthe hairs rise on the back of one's neckは「身の毛がよだつ」という意味です。この他にもthe hairs stand up on the back of my neck、The hairs on the back of your neck stands upというかたちや、make the hair stand on endやmake one’s hair curlで「身の毛のよだつ思いをさせる」「ぞっとさせる」という表現があります。さらにhair-raising「身の毛のよだつような」「ぞっとするような」という表現も合わせてチェックしておきたいと思います(『リーダーズ英和辞典』)。(Othello)

身の毛がよだつ - 田邉祐司ゼミ 常時英心:言葉の森から

Fright nights: why theatre shocks but rarely scares | Stage | The Guardian
From the Woman in Black to killers in thrillers, theatre has plenty of characters that shock – but it takes Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth to well and truly terrify

(前略)In the normal run of things, I'd say theatre is rarely frightening: it's less openly manipulative than cinema and you are usually conscious of your surroundings. But I can recall a handful of occasions when I've genuinely felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck. Perhaps unsurprisingly, two of them involve Macbeth. When Judi Dench played Lady Macbeth at Stratford's Other Place in 1976, there was a moment when she invoked the earth's dark spirits to unsex her and "fill [her], from the crown to the toe, top-full/ Of direst cruelty": as she did so, Dench suddenly leapt back with a stab of fear, as if Satanic forces were stirring in her. That was truly terrifying – as was the moment in Rupert Goold's more recent production of the play at Chichester and in London, when the lift doors of the hero's underground chamber suddenly opened to reveal three Witches in the guise of hospital nurses. On both occasions, it was the sense of being in the presence of evil that made you start.
(中略)
But these are exceptions. As a rule, I think it's both reductive and pointless to play on an audience's primitive fears, which is why I'm deeply suspicious of those immersive spectacles that plunge people into darkened rooms. They seem to me, aesthetically, no better than the old spooky Ghost Train, with its cobwebbed skeletons, you used to find at fairgrounds. As someone who often has to write overnight reviews to a fierce deadline, there's only one thing in the theatre that genuinely scares me: the words, "The show doesn't come down until 11pm."