Word: deeley
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...Times, Pinter reshapes the archetypes central to his work. In different ways, Deeley and Kate each fight to maintain their huddled numbness against incursions from the outside world, from the past, from the primal depths of their own subconscious. The catalyst of the conflict is Ann, Kate's companion of twenty years before. Anna brings a history heavy with menace, to upset the poor balance that Deeley and Kate had achieved through silence, and pierce their protective anaesthesia. Characteristically, Pinter leaves the true nature of the past events clouded in uncertainty--he himself does not claim to know exactly what...
...witness a struggle between Deeley and Anna for the possession of Kate. Deeley knows the emptiness of his marriage with Kate, and he is driven to the wall by Anna's sinister exploitation of this weakness, in order to win Kate back to the sensual and aesthetic lesbian relationship of twenty years before. Deeley's counter-attacks turn on his attempt to establish his male dominance by fabricating past confrontations in which women are degraded. If he can force the two women to subservient roles, his validity as a husband will be unquestioned...
...ANNA DEGRADES Deeley in her recreations of the past, and tries to win Kate with sensuous appeals to a former closeness that has been denied to Deeley. Ultimately it is Kate who commands the most powerful position: she has only to say "No" to either or both of them. But she must first settle her own conflict between the powerful pressures exerted on her by the others, and the desire to withdraw into herself...
MICHAEL MARTORANO, as Deeley, holds up well through the skirmishes of the first act, succumbing as Anna woos Kate just before the curtain. But he crumbles early in the second act, just after he has dealt Anna a setback in their battle of mutual degradation. Deeley's heavy emphasis on second meanings and his lumbering, wounded desperation rob his words, his weapons, of the strength they had held in the first act. The veneer of civility, too, skillfully maintained in Act I, becomes a travesty earlier than it should...
Delphic Questions. Several things are suggested; none is certain. Kate and Anna may have had a lesbian relationship. Deeley may once have known Anna beyond the voyeuristic intimacy of looking up her white thighs at a party. Did Deeley or Kate go with Anna to the film Odd Man Out'? Delphic questions-Delphic answers, scattered clues to nowhere except perhaps the murky recesses of the subconscious mind...