Word: pinter
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This was David Storey's second play, written before he had fully found and measured his silences. Only Pinter can make the unspoken as eloquent as Storey, can round an intimation into a metaphor, a nuance into a theme. Storey's plays make strange music, strike notes that reverberate just on the edge of consciousness...
...Comedian Jack Benny the pauses were always more eloquent than the gags. When he died last week of cancer, Benny had become the grand master of comic timing; like Playwrights Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett, he had built a career around silence...
Novelist Stone's language is spare, constantly earning maximum effects with all but invisible efforts. A military career is summed up as years "of shining shoes and saluting automobiles." Much of the novel is dialogue, simultaneously as laconic and menacing as a scene by Harold Pinter...
This psychic violence gathers beneath a fine membrane of civility. Remarkably, Pinter succeeds in creating a fabric of conversation that contains and covers the anxieties and animosities, without ever concealing them. Subtly, urbanely, the characters bring these elemental passions to the surface in the guise of recollections, much in the same way that instincts take form in the symbols of dreams. But this delicate control is tenuous, and the volcanic passions can erupt with dreadful impact at any time. When this happens, the damage is, as Pinter says, "irrevocable...
...rather jarring effect of this rejection arises also from Bonnie Brewster's interesting but somewhat inconsistent interpretation of Kate. Pinter carefully prepares Kate's withdrawal from the tangled demands of her relationships, as the play unfolds. But Brewster's development of this side of Kate is hampered by an excess of vitality. Her surprising tenseness at the beginning of the play, while dramatically provocative, undercuts the numbed aloofness that is a necessary counter-balance to the prevailing tensions. Kate's shower in the second act cleanses her of the sordid jealousy displayed by the others, and leads...