Word: pinter
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...Shaffer was a kindred spirit to Mankiewicz: a cunning wordsmith with a playwright brother; his identical twin, Peter, wrote Equus and Amadeus. Like Mankiewicz (and Pinter, for that matter), Shaffer was fascinated by the ability of language to reveal, conceal and distort the workings of a person's mind and desires. In Sleuth he created a Chinese-box plot that on the surface was a very theatrical mystery, but at heart was a parable of sexual envy and English class hatred. Again, right up Pinter's dark alley...
...youth was seen as the hope of English-speaking theater - "the new Olivier," critics said - and who had one-upped Olivier by directing and starring in an acclaimed film of Shakespeare's Henry V while still in his 20s. The new script for Sleuth is by Harold Pinter, the most demanding and honored playwright of the past half-century. Pinter, after all, did win the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature; and at 77, this imperious Brit is surely beyond the worry of writing scripts for 14-year-old American boys. So his criminal botch...
...Indeed, Sleuth (which Pinter has said he never saw performed) is a project that seems perfect for him. He made his esteemed rep with creepy, enigmatic studies of human menace - works like The Caretaker, The Homecoming, Old Times, No Man's Land. He'd put two people in a room (that is, on the stage) and not let them out till the bitterness erupted and the blood flowed. Such was Pinter's craft and nerve that the audience felt as caged as the characters. It just made sense to let him loose on Shaffer's one-room play about...
...Pinter, in adapting the play, betrayed a carelessness bordering on contempt. The original is a two-act story that takes more than two hours; the new one synopsizes all that plot into the first hour, then adds a third act that diminishes, demeans, defames both the material and the actors. To slam home the theme of sexual aggression, Pinter forces one of the characters to dress in drag. Which makes Sleuth fit into the year's dominant trend, of movies from 300 to Blades of Glory, from Chuck and Larry to Superbad: guys channel their attraction or hatred for each...
...selection process as a kind of geopolitical checkers match, as the Swedish Academy plucks major figures from the national literatures of far-flung countries: China (Gao Xingjian, 2000) Trinidad and Tobago (V.S. Naipaul, 2001), Hungary (Irme Kertesz, 2002), South Africa (J.M. Coetzee, 2003), Austria (Elfriede Jelinek, 2004), England (Harold Pinter, 2005), Turkey (Orhan Pamuk, 2006). By choosing Doris Lessing in 2007 the Academy has scored a triple: she was born in Iran, known then as Persia, in 1919; raised in Zimbabwe, known then as Rhodesia; and lives in the U.K. In its citation, the academy called her "that epicist...