Word: pinter
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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What is Stanley's crime? Are Goldberg and McCann agents of a murder ring, symbols of organized society, or instruments of fate? What torture do the pair inflict on Stanley? Rarely has Pinter left more to the playgoer's imagination. The American cast keeps its English accents tidy but not its performances, and Director Alan Schneider lets the first act drowse. Basically, the play lacks the athletic snap and resonance of The Caretaker's dialogue and the musky animal magnetism of The Homecoming family. But whether or not he baffles playgoers, Harold Pinter exerts a modish appeal...
...Pinter's play patterns coalesce about three recurring elements and phases-the room, the torment, and the expiation. The room is the setting, the torment is often an extended abrasive comic put-on, and the expiation is usually an act of physical or psychic violence. The room is a square womb. Though lighted, it seems dark, partly because it is sometimes windowless or tightly curtained against any blade of outside light. Outside this haven of refuge lurks the nameless, faceless intruder who will violate the safety and innocence of the room...
...torment is often comic, but it is no laughing matter. In Pinter as in Kafka, punishment presupposes guilt, even if the crime is unspecified. The act of atonement is always arbitrary. In expiation, a Pinter hero-victim may lose his life, or his wife, or his mind. Kafka's religious overtones find no echo in Pinter. To him, the universe runs with the remorseless senselessness of a concentration camp...
Squalid, vicious, mean and stupid, Pinter's characters may seem to deserve all the bad things in life. They are certainly a thoroughly unsympathetic lot, and not one of them ever performs a generous act. They are animals, but first of all they are theatrical animals. They hold the stage like a military position. An actor long before he became a playwright, Pinter writes scenes with which actors can rivet an audience's attention. His stage animals circle and sniff and snarl and claw at each other, and the odor of vitality permeates the playhouse. These animals have...
...matter how sluggish they may appear, Pinter's people arrive on stage primed for combat, and words are their weapons. For a Tennessee Williams, language is a rhetorically scented bouquet of roses to be showered on an audience in fond profusion. To Pinter, language is sniper fire: laconic, staccato, precise, designed to cut down the people one hates. He uses two kinds of speech: words that are dead and words that can kill. The dead words are the burnt-toast banalities of daily life: "I've got your corn flakes ready. Here's your...