Word: britishisms
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...Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (and registering as a conscientious objector when he was called up for national service), Pinter escaped into regional theater, where he played in repertory for a dozen years. The man who much later reputedly turned down a knighthood rather than align himself with the British government once acted like a baron: David Baron was his stage name. (He would keep acting, off and on, for the rest of his life.) It allowed him to prep for the stage characters he would create, since, as he told Gussow, "I always played the sinister parts...
...reached an early maturity with his second full-length play, The Caretaker, which the Lord Chamberlain, the British censor, called "a piece of incoherence in the manner of Samuel Beckett" - unintentional high praise indeed. It's the tale of an old homeless man, Jenkins (played onstage and in the excellent 1963 film version by Donald Pleasance), who is brought to the home of the simple-minded Aston (Robert Shaw) and his conniving brother Mick (Alan Bates). Jenkins begins as the ratty interloper but becomes sympathetic by default as the brothers play their mind games. The plot fits the contours...
...powerful intimidated their victims was to accuse them of being unclean - tidiness being a mid-1950s British preoccupation. In Mick's first chat with Jenkins, he accuses the old man of "stinking the place out," and he ends his final diatribe by saying, "And to put the old tin lid on it, you stink from arsehole to breakfast time." Wendy Craig, as the young employer's upper-class fiancée in The Servant, turns her sneering attention to the new butler (Dirk Bogarde) and asks him, "Do you use a deodorant? Do you think you go well with...
...Though his plays became sparer and less frequent, he remained an industrious producer of scripts, especially for the movies. Assigned all manner of British novels to adapt, he turned virtually all of them - The Servant, The Pumpkin Eater, The Quiller Memorandum, Accident, The Go-Between, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Handmaid's Tale - into parables of class inequity and betrayed alliances. (He also did a starchy version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon and, for his last script, an ugly botch of the Anthony Shaffer thriller Sleuth.) He directed other men's plays, notably Simon Gray...
...classic carols and Scripture readings, the format was developed in 1880 by Edward White Benson, who later served as Archbishop of Canterbury. The service was originally used by cathedrals and churches connected with British colleges and schools. Because the school terms ended before Christmas, the service gave the students and faculty a way of observing the holiday several weeks early. In 1918, however, it was modified by Eric Milner-White, the Dean of King's College, Cambridge, for a festival held on Christmas Eve. The format took off and has remained basically unchanged ever since. (See people finding...