Word: pinter
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Stage humor is in transition. The old humor of the gag and the wise crack was confident, benign, a pick-me-up rather than a putdown. The new humor, which draws its tone from play wrights such as Albee and Pinter, is cruel, taut-nerved, and speaks the lingo of the obscene and the absurd, not funny-ha-ha but funny-peculiar. The new humor reigns in off-Broadway's Scuba Duba, a flagellatingly funny first play by Novelist Bruce Jay Friedman (Stern, A Mother's Kisses...
Where such playwrights as Christopher Fry and T. S. Eliot tried to pour drama into forms of poetry that could be swallowed as painlessly as prose, Pinter has achieved a more subtly musical poetry of rhythms, an antiphony of repetitions and pauses. Each of his plays seems composed, as well as written...
...glibbest assumption about Pinter-that he dramatizes the severed communication lines of modern man-is the least accurate. Not inability to communicate but unwillingness to communicate is his central theme. He argues: "I think that we communicate only too well, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility." And so, to Pinter's people, speech is a strategy for escaping detection. They reverse their statements and talk past other people...
With all this evasive action at the heart of his plays it is apparent that Pinter would rather transcribe a state of being than subscribe to a statement of belief. Still, it is possible to spot a few of the dimes of thought he is dancing on. They are all theatrical ideas, perhaps excessively so. Pirandello is his playwrighting godfather, and all of Pinter's plays could be subtitled "Right You Are, If You Think You Are." Like Pirandello, he believes that illusion is infinite and that truth and reality lie in the eye of the beholder. He assumes...
What endows Pinter with his immense theatricality also seems to stunt the scope of his mind and art. All the world's a stage, but the stage is not all of the world. The question remains whether Pinter, having amply proved bis ability to capture a particular mode and style of dramatic existence, can or will move on to describe more comprehensive states of being...