Word: pinter
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...Pinter room. Anyone who has seen almost any of Harold Pinter's plays will know exactly what that phrase means. A cold, unwelcoming, claustrophobic chamber, in which the inhabitants live in anticipation of a visitor - a threat to their dingy equilibrium. Pinter's plays have been performed all over the world, from Australia to China, and an awful lot of people have recognized those lonely rooms...
...Despite the crashing failure in 1958 of his first full-length play The Birthday Party (it was pulled out of a London theater after just four performances, following catastrophic reviews), Harold Pinter has risen to become perhaps Britain's most revered contemporary writer. That reputation started to build with his second full-length play, The Caretaker, an instant hit that ran for 444 performances and was quickly followed by international productions. Certainly he has attained the rare distinction of having merited an adjective in the Oxford English Dictionary - "Pinteresque: ... pertaining to, or characteristic of ... Harold Pinter, or his works...
...bundle of joy. The older couple then arrive, and, after quite a bit of gab, steal the baby and proceed to convince the younger pair that the infant never existed. These kinds of mysterious mind games, of course, are old hat to anyone who has been paying attention to Pinter, Mamet or even Albee in his better days. But here's it's especially facile and inauthentic: The "power" this older couple has over the younger seems to be entirely manufactured by the playwright (could anyone but an old man have written this play?) rather than growing...
...teamed with the third great theater knight, Ralph Richardson, in two modern mystery plays: David Storey's Home, in which two old gents chat thrillingly into their dotage; and Harold Pinter's No Man's Land, with Gielgud superbly seedy as a down-on-his-art writer. Yet his first love was Shakespeare, and one imagines the feeling was mutual. In the celebratory book Sir John, Guinness recalls a dinner in the '30s when Gielgud dithered about which of many projects to do next. One chum finally said, "Oh, shut up, dear! Just stick a crown on your head...
...brought social criticism to the fore. The film practically drips with satire--but it's a satire that's not entirely Austen. Of course, the story itself mocks many of the mores of the society Austen depicts, and the movie, accordingly, is not without some excellent moments (Harold Pinter makes an excellent pre-Victorian patriarch, dropping proper ultimatums right and left). But the new Mansfield Park, Rozema-style, takes the satire to a new level, mocking an entire era and bringing to the surface its deficiencies and ridiculousness. The criticism of the Antiguan slave trade in particular, less prominent...