Word: pinter
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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These bleak puppets seek shelter in squalid, motionless routine. Instead of moving toward a comforting resolution, Pinter's plays develop by shedding obscurities until emotions and paradoxes in a situation are uncovered...
Carefully Pinter scrapes away the aimless talk and blank expressions that coat real feelings. Underneath we discover a galaxy of neurotic horrors: curious inversions of appearances, petrified wills, secret dreads, loneliness, and despair. These interior stresses are just as commonplace as the banalities that overlay them, even though they are revealed in bizarre ways. The pettiness and self-deception begin to seem less an insipid veneer than a shield for sanity...
Although his themes are hollowness and banality, Pinter never gets boring or inane. Symbols constantly tempt the imagination. The pathetic small talk that dominates his dialogue generates a grotesque humor. While Pinter's characters chatter the same phrases over and over, his plays take on a futility that makes them funny and an expectancy that makes them suspenseful. The comic tone shuts off as a climax approaches, because in Pinter's drama a slow disinterment of inner tragedy creates the suspense...
Director David Wheeler paces The Dumbwaiter very fast and packs a bit too much levity into it, so that transitions between ludicrousness and anxiety sometimes come off awkwardly. But neither mood overpowers the other, and the pulse of Pinter's story never misses a beat. Dustin Hoffman and Paul Benedict are well-matched as the brains-and-lummox partners; only Hoffman's antics occasionally smack of Kellogg's Cornflakes, and he tends to mix up his Cockney with Brooklynese...
...Wheeler directs The Room perfectly. He loses none of the mingled nonsense and horror in Pinter's writing and modulates the tension smoothly as it climbs toward a climax...