Word: pinter
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Both times, though, they were splendid eviscerations of married life. So we may say that "meaning" doesn't matter if the work creates its own world, if it lives onstage, as Pinter's plays so vibrantly and mischievously did. Under all the mysterioso legerdemain, he was the Shakespeare of rhetorical bullying. The bickering men in The Caretaker and Old Times, the quarreling couples in Old Times and Betrayal, the desperate or rancorous family in The Birthday Party and The Homecoming - the rivalries and recriminations of all these mean creatures sparked instant and lasting theatrical pyrotechnics. Who could ask for more...
...Pinter Became Pinteresque...
...Instead of university, Pinter turned to the theater for his advanced schooling. Hating his time at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (and registering as a conscientious objector when he was called up for national service), Pinter escaped into regional theater, where he played in repertory for a dozen years. The man who much later reputedly turned down a knighthood rather than align himself with the British government once acted like a baron: David Baron was his stage name. (He would keep acting, off and on, for the rest of his life.) It allowed him to prep for the stage...
Like John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Alan Sillitoe and other novelists and dramatists in what was dubbed the "Angry Young Men" group (after Osborne's 1956 play Look Back in Anger), Pinter was not a product of the Oxford-Cambridge factory for leaders in politics, industry and the arts. Being neither born nor bred into the upper class, these writers made class their theme: the resentment and suspicion the unders had for the uppers, which Pinter stripped of overt political references and flipped into the power that one person exercises with cool brutality over another. The TIME description of his script...
...could call The Caretaker an Old Dark House horror movie, where a ghost comes in to haunt the humans and is scared away by their calculated nastiness. It's also Pinter's first political play: Jenkins is a refugee, poor and tired, the very definition of wretched refuse. Aston, who as a teenager was submitted to shock therapy, leaving him effectively lobotomized, can be seen as a victim of state-sponsored torture. And Mick is the bluff overlord, cracking jokes as he metaphorically cracks skulls...