Word: pinter
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...PINTER is a master of the language, no doubt about it. His lines operate on many levels-the one which the actors understand, the one the audience understands, and the one that only Pinter himself understands. When Max, the aged, mad and offensive old man in The Homecoming, berates his oldest son for bringing his wife into the house, saying, "I've never had a whore under this roof before, ever since your mother died," only Pinter knows how right...
Ruth is a whore, although the audience doesn't know it yet. The true import of Pinter's words, like the pronouncements of Cassandra, are never quite clear until the scene has been fully played out. The joke is on the actors, but also on the audience, for the broad one-liners always turn out to have a deeper meaning. This is the essence of Pinter: the audience snickers and chuckles its way through the play, only to realize at the end, that it was not funny...
Death is not, of course, a particularly original theme in this genre, but Orton doesn't strive for chills as Pinter did in Accident. Instead, he applies black humor within the blissfully sloppy and easy-going frame of character-types which are so familiar that they never really threaten to be ominous: The Sherlock Holmes sleuth who stalks, magnifying glass in hand, the unctuous undertaker who speaks of "floral tributes," the cool-as-ice nurse who hides a whopping sex drive. With characters such as these, each occupationally linked to death, but in funny, obsessive ways, Orton spins a yarn...
Perhaps the highest compliment that may be paid to their mutual work is that they raise Pinter's first full-length drama to virtually equivalent rank with such later, more lavishly acclaimed dramas as The Caretaker and The Homecoming. Actually, The Birthday Party seems to possess a more vivid symbolic imagery and a greater sense of motion than the other two plays. Like Waiting for Godot, although in a totally ominous sense, this is a play about waiting. Stanley (Robert Phalen) is a piano-playing recluse hiding out as a boarder in a small provincial town. The landlady (Betty...
Grisly stuff, one might think, but not so, thanks to Pinter's sense of the ludicrous and his love of vaudeville and word juggling. While tickling the mind and prickling the skin, Pinter makes one giggle and gasp in the same breath...