Word: pinter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Hartley's work was better served by Jo seph Losey and Harold Pinter a couple of years back in The Go-Between. Once again, as in The Go-Between, class consciousness induces a terse, desperate kind of sexuality, then thwarts it. But there the similarity ends. Robert Shaw portrays a stolid, ambitious owner of a small hired-car firm. Sarah Miles the balmy aristocrat whom he chauffeurs and who drives hi, in turn, to excess es of frustration. Miles' meager talents, her shrill, spindly posturings, have lost through incessant repetition the small novelty they might once have...
MOST IMPORTANT is their isolation from each other. Duff's words hold the supreme irony: "We're together, that's what matters." In Landscape we watch Pinter portray the inability of humans to communicate with each other, not in a play with "whole" characters possessing relatively clear motives who at least talk to each other--as in Night School--but in two monologues, delivered by people whose past is for us largely an inseparable mixture of fact and fantasy, and whose motives are unknown...
With Silence, the dissolution of naturalistic play structures is complete. In Night School we had a "plot" a conventional set and recognizable characters. In Landscape, at least we knew Duff and Beth were married, and knew a little of their past. With his Landscape set, Franco Colavecchia did what Pinter did with words, creating the impression of a country kitchen with only the barest of sets: a table, two chairs, side walls and a hanging wall fragment at the rear...
...casts of Landscape and Silence are each excellent, the more so considering the difficulty of the plays. Following Samuel Beckett, Pinter has stripped away all that is unnecessary, so that every word--and more importantly every silence--is crucial. Indeed, the high quality of these plays is best found in the intensity of their silences...
Still, the greatest plaudits must go to the director, Sarah Stearns for bringing these three plays together, for in so doing she has made theater a dynamic event, progressing in two dimensions at once. The Loeb production lets us watch Pinter push his theme of human separation to the limit, and at the same time successfully strip the medium conveying that theme to its barest essentials...