Word: pinter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...LOVER, by Harold Pinter, and PLAY, by Samuel Beckett, reach depressing but strangely playful conclusions about infidelity-Pinter with mystifying urbanity, Beckett with poetic obscurity...
With only a smidgen of a plot to drive them, this unholy trio thrashes out a sometimes funny, sometimes corrosive drama based on Harold Pinter's London and Broadway stage success, The Caretaker. It is still morbidly fascinating to watch. And what made the play important remains perfectly clear: dialogue so richly human that every vile syllable sounds like a cry for help, plus superb acting of their original roles by Pleasence, Shaw and Bates...
...playwright's bleak study of mankind may be an allegory subject to highly colorful interpretations, it may only be an exercise in ambiguity. The movie falters, too, because the flaws of filmed theater become obvious when ever Director Clive Donner and Scenarist Pinter try most earnestly to "open up" the play in cinema terms. A room sealed against the real and imagined terrors of the outside world is the natural hell of Pinter's characters, and a legitimate theater is an intimate place to share them. To set them roaming into the street or off to a neighborhood...
Because of the unusually great importance of sustaining the atmosphere, the few technical difficulties became especially annoying. The new lighting system flickered several times; an easily understood minor disorder in the typical House production becomes a minor disaster in a Pinter play...
...play's best moments were its amusing ones, but Pinter's complex creation and the workshop's production did produce a dramatic close despite its unevenness. The audience shares Rose's shock and terror when she cries...