Word: pinter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Slight Ache, Gregory Farrell's Edward--fists clenched, temper detonating predictably--is rarely more than a caricature, a man who lost his mind long before the late-summer afternoon when he decides to confront "the figure at the end of the garden." The audience is deprived of Pinter's fascinating study of the way the man's personality disintegrates when threatened by a powerful negative force in the Matchseller. Barbara Borzumato, on the other hand, plays a disarmingly uncomplicated Flora. Her real, repressed self surfaces in the course of her positive reaction to the forces that destroy her husband. Borzumato...
...PECULIAR characteristics of the radio medium--flexibility, intimacy and the tremendous importance of the spoken word--tend to be lost when radio plays are translated into theater. When Harold Pinter wrote A Slight Ache (1959) and The Dwarfs (1960), the two plays being staged by the Adams House Drama Society this weekend, he used the radio form to experiment with a dramatic structure he felt could be "more flexible and mobile than in any other medium." More than his works written for stage, the radio plays are characterized by lucid visual imagery. His language paints whole worlds in the mind...
...Pinter's silences and manipulation of tempo are crucial--they illuminate the dark spaces behind his terse, economical language, convey the Matchseller's power over Edward, and express (in The Dwarfs) Len's isolation and the abyss into which his attempts at communication disappear. Edward and Flora's stream of consciousness babble must be broken by pauses if we are to understand how he comes to destroy himself and dies a symbolic death, while she rediscovers herself and finds a new life...
Smitten Fascination. All these virtues can make The Last Tycoon a pleasure. They do not make it a success. Kazan and Pinter go smarmy in the romantic episodes, where Fitzgerald struggled for-and found-a saving, tough-minded detachment. Here, Kathleen is rendered with the same smitten fascination that overcame Stahr. She is played by Newcomer Ingrid Boulting (stepdaughter of British Producer Roy Boulting) with a sort of spacey spirituality that seems part Pre-Raphaelite, part post-psychedelic. Theresa Russell, who plays Brady's daughter, the proud possessor of a crush on Stahr, is around more than her role...
...legends of Hollywood. The movie does improve Fitzgerald's convoluted plans for ending the novel, which required a murder and a plane crash. Here, Stahr is swallowed up in the looming darkness of a sound stage. It is a lovely, but treacherously romantic image. In effect, Kazan and Pinter turn their own movie into another part of Stahr's dream. The movie is about the sad solitude that power brings, the high price of genius. These are shallow, narcissistic notions, not so much out of place as out of focus. It was Hollywood, after all, that helped create...