Word: pinter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Harold Pinter's plays can be viewed as attempts to write the same play. Each new work appears to be another approximation of some Platonic ideal in which Pinter yearns finally to reduce a few characteristic themes and methods to their purest state, finally to narrow his focus to a vision of life in its quiddity. In these terms, Old Times, which opened last week in London, may be his nearest miss...
...plot encapsulates the basic Pinter situation. Two people are together, in this case a documentary film maker and his wife of 20 years, who live in a remote farmhouse. They are joined by a third person who has ties to the past of one of them-a woman with whom the wife lived during her days as a secretary in London. As usual with Pinter, the surface is unremittingly mundane. Coffee is poured, snatches of old songs are sung, memories are exchanged. Also as usual, the action is punctuated by pregnant pauses, the lines surrounded by halos of significant silence...
Calculated Precisely. All of this may strike some playgoers as merely another Pinter puzzle, and a rather dehydrated one at that. But in fact it is a virtuoso display of how subtle, gripping and revealing a drama can be , J fashioned from such spare materials. Fixed with Pinter's almost hallucinatory concentration and clarity, every word and gesture has its measured weight and effect. The climaxes are restrained, yet so precisely calculated-as when the two women suddenly lapse into speaking with each other as if they were roommates again-that the impact can be shattering...
...subject is the middle-aged founder of a Southern fundamentalist religion, which ordains anybody to the ministry by request (and the payment of a love offering), a former Bible salesman who did five years in jail for exhibitionism. The other characters are all refugees from every depressing Harold Pinter play you've ever seen-a virtual corps de ballet of nymphomaniacs, alcoholics, homosexuals, and a seventy-five year old Indian millionaire worried about his potency...
...direction of The Homecoming is exceptionally good. David Keyser has gotten his actors into character, their accents polished and their presence refined. He has a solid idea of how The Homecoming should be played, communicating Pinter's basic idea summed up in Max's advice to his third son, the would-be boxer: "What you've got to do is defend yourself, then you've got to learn how to attack ... once you've learned those two things, you can go straight...