Word: pinter
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...Room and A Slight Ache. Harold Pinter's plays not only have plots; they often seem to be plots. He conspires to elude, delude, tease, frustrate, irritate, and mystify the audience, all of course to a highly salutary end. Pinter leads the playgoer very far from home to signify that something at the mysterious heart of human existence consists in being precisely there-very far from home. The Room and A Slight Ache are early Pinter one-acters of quasi-comic menace, not always dexterous but distinctly absorbing, the work of a man forming his own indelible dramatic signature...
...blind Negro (Robertearl Jones) who begs her to come home and implies that he is her father. Mr. Hudd returns, savagely batters the Negro to the floor, and as the curtain starts to drop, Mrs. Hudd turns blind. There are no safe guesses when it comes to Pinter, but a half-safe guess is that the blind Negro is Death or Fate, the ultimate invaders of cozy islands of tranquillity...
...Pinter's juxtaposition of these three oddly assorted men in a room serves to generalize their dilemma. But in showing his characters failing to get across to each other, failing to see any reflections of themselves in the world, Pinter also seems to express reverence and amazement toward the mysterious internal drives that keep them going...
...convenient visual elements. And although close-ups coerce the attention better than any stake device, they imply a kind of psychological familiarity with the characters which the script doesn't provide. Close-ups do magnify Pleasence's incredible range of facial contortions. But a collective stage view served Pinter's ends better...
Scenarist Harold Pinter and Director Jack Clayton (Room At The Top) show proper scorn for the easy tricks of melodrama. Their unsentimental aim is to take a marriage apart and nail up the bleeding pieces for honest scrutiny. Often as not, they succeed, finding lethal words and crisp images to express the timeless battle that Author Mortimer describes as "men and women who murder each other with all the weapons of devotion...