Word: pinter
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...Pinter turned 70 last October, and a year of international tributes reaches its climax this month with a string of high-profile events. At London's New Ambassador's Theatre, the writer himself stars in a Gate Theatre of Dublin production of his One for the Road, a brutal study of torture and totalitarianism (July 3-7). Across the city, the Royal Court Theatre is performing a Pinter double-bill, Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes. After London, the Royal Court show and One for the Road will travel to New York City with two other Gate productions, the double...
...Demand for these events has been tremendous. "Tickets have been flying out of the door," says Nigel Redden, director of the Lincoln Center Festival. Sales for the Pinter shows, he reports, are brisker than for last year's Bolshoi visit, its first in a decade. Redden says he received a telephone call from an excited Israeli before the Pinter Festival had even been publicized - the man wanted details so he and 18 friends could book flights to New York...
...what is it about Pinter - director (of major productions starring Lauren Bacall and Faye Dunaway), political activist (he campaigned against "NATO machismo" in Kosovo), actor and, of course, playwright - that has touched so many? His plays are not as immediately funny as Alan Ayckbourn's, and you cannot easily sympathize with his invariably damaged, degraded characters as you can with those of, say, Arthur Miller. Pinter is more difficult, in every sense, than his contemporaries, and his rooms are battlegrounds...
...Homecoming, for instance, a woman controls her patronizing husband and his lecherous family by becoming a high-class hooker. The Caretaker depicts a three-way conflict between a tramp and the two brothers who take him in. Pinter's most recent play, Celebration (also at the Lincoln Center Festival), features an oblique struggle for dominance between two sets of diners in a restaurant - yet you never know precisely why they are competing. The stakes are never obvious in Pinter. Characters' true meanings are always hidden between and behind the words. A simple invitation to sit down can become a dangerous...
...also has an uncanny ability to create characters who, though they are seldom given specific histories, are at once menacing and often desperately sad. Peter Hall, who directed all but one of Pinter's new theater plays for 21 years, from 1962 until the two fell out over what Pinter felt were unfriendly observations about him in Hall's published diaries (they have since been reconciled), loves that unpredictability about his characters. "They are mysteries." says Hall, "selfish, outrageous, predatory, often likable - just like us. Their mystery is our mystery." Adds Duncan: "He's not in the business of giving...