Word: pinter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Apted's actors love the English language as much as the playwright does. The spare, precise dialogue practically detonates from their lips. Bates, playing the paranoid husband, is the quintessential Pinter menace: if looks could kill, the rest of the cast would be dead. He is well countered by McDowell in the role of a serpentine climber who may or may not be sleeping with both a male housemate and Bates' wife. As McDowell's keeper, a prissy old couturier, Olivier has The Collection's only openly emotional scene. It is a shocker. When he falls...
...Collection (Oct. 25, PBS, 9 p.m. E.D.T.). Not terribly much happens during this hour-long play by Harold Pinter. Phones ring at odd times of night. A London boutique owner unexpectedly drops in on a dress designer who lives in a baroque town house down the road. Two men almost stage a duel with delicate cheese knives. A husband fears that his wife may have had an affair in a hotel room in Leeds. Not much happens during The Collection, but by the time the play is over at least three lives have been shattered. That's the wonder...
...Collection, written in 1960, is one of Pinter's best plays-a small masterpiece. Skillfully constructed and mordantly funny, it is as scathing as a Waugh novel, as suspenseful as a Hitchcock film. (Pinter, like Hitchcock, even used a "McGufinn" -in this case, the alleged Leeds affair -to get his narrative rolling.) PBS's version of the play, imported from England's Granada International Television for the Great Performances series, may well be the definitive production. Director Michael Apted has obtained a riveting ensemble performance from a dream cast: Laurence Olivier, Alan Bates, Malcolm McDowell and Helen...
...parlayed his rugged good looks and powerful screen presence into late-blooming Hollywood stardom; of a heart attack; in Tourmakeady, Ireland. Shaw wrote five novels, critically acclaimed in his native Britain, and rewrote one, The Man in the Glass Booth, as a successful Broadway play directed by Harold Pinter. But he was best known as an actor, first on the London stage (Tiger at the Gates, The Long and the Short and the Tall), later in American movies, where he portrayed a wide-ranging gallery of rogues. Among them: a sinister assassin in From Russia with Love, Henry VIII...
Prefer your comedy with some psychological thrills instead of social satire? Then check out Dumbwaiter, a one-acter by Harold Pinter, at the Explosives B Cabaret. It's a vaudeville comedy, in the tradition of Laurel and Hardy, that will keep you on the edge of your seat in suspence (according to director Peter Sellars). A piece for two actors--we can't seem to escape these British two-man works this weekend-Dumbwaiter pre-dates the playwright's well-known "Homecoming," and might be interesting for those who'd like to see early Pinter, as well as those...