Word: pinter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
GOOD ACTING OFTEN GETS WASTED in a bad play and that tragedy occurs in the Class Act Production's staging of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker, currently at the Lyric Stage Theater in Boston. Pre performances by the three-woman cast are high powered and believable, yet the characters they play are one dimensional and difficult to understand...
...defined personality filled with idiosyncracies, the script does not enable them to develop fully into a person with whom the audience can identify. Not only are the characters confined physically in the one room where the play takes place, but they are also limited mentally by the sketchy world Pinter creates for them...
Screenplay by Harold Pinter...
...first thing Betrayal undermines is our expectations of conventional moral responses, that is not the last or even the most important of its reversals. Adapting his own play, Pinter has retained the device that supplied its theatrical renown, a reverse structure. This is no mere matter of flashbacks. Rather, Pinter charts the entire course of Jerry's affair with Emma backward, starting with a wistful coda, then proceeding through breakup, Robert's discovery of what the couple is up to, the rental of a love nest, the first illicit meeting, the initial acknowledgment of mutual attraction, with which...
...Pinter also overturns one's stylistic expectations. When the English upper crust gets to pip-pipping about infidelity, the viewer settles back prepared for a comedy of manners. What he gets here is very little comedy, a great many mannerisms, and none of the sentiment that Noel Coward used to employ to make things come right at the final curtain. Betrayal must be understood, then, as a critique of a theatrical style and of unthinking audiences who have been having an amoral laugh and a tickle with it for years...