Word: pinter
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...professor resembles the broken-spirited figures in anticommunist plays by Pinter or Havel, ready to comply with anything just to end the humiliation and pain. His ugly spiral downward is at once outlandish and entirely plausible, and it had this audience member virtually leaping out of his chair in fury at the injustice and unreason. Whatever the bumps -- and there are a few in Mamet's staging of his text -- the power to incense, like that to sadden or amuse, is reason enough to cheer for the future of the theater...
Havel, born in 1935 and raised in a well-to-do bourgeois family, began as an absurdist playwright in the style of Ionesco or Pinter or Beckett. An attitude of surrealist paranoia turned out to be the right moral optic through which to see the Communist world clearly, and Havel had keen eyesight. Constricted as a playwright, he became a dissident. Imprisoned as a dissident, he became a symbol. Communism was brutal and stupid and corrupt. Havel was Czechoslovakia with brains -- the country's better self, its idealist, its moral philosopher, the visionary of "living in truth." When the Communist...
...HOMECOMING. A quarter-century's passage and a second-rate Broadway revival reveal that what seemed scary, mysterious and darkly funny in Harold Pinter's signature work was mostly just implausible. The one strong performance, by Roy Dotrice as a chortling gutter patriarch, lacks the ferocity of Paul Rogers in the original...
...nothing new. In London, however, it is the centerpiece of a stage scene abruptly aquiver after a couple of years of doldrums. New plays by David Hare, Alan Ayckbourn, Hugh Whitemore and Timberlake Wertenbaker have been running. Still to come this month are a one- act from Harold Pinter and Alan Bennett's The Madness of George...
...Colin and Mary (Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson), resident at a hostelry outside their native land and facing up to yet another common middle-class problem. Their setting is Venice; their issue is the joylessness of sex. But the mood, well established by Paul Schrader's direction and Harold Pinter's elliptical screenplay, is one of languid menace. It is personified by Christopher Walken, excellent as Robert, whose psychopathic weirdness simultaneously attracts and repels the couple. And mysteriously energizes them. In his sexuality there is political metaphor. He is an undeclared fascist, hiding the threat of self- destruction under...