Word: pinter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...same enthusiastic way that he might recommend an excellent little restaurant slightly off the tourist track. The Peopled Wound is valuable not because it makes some intuitive new leap of insight but because it gathers in one convenient place most of what has been said and thought about Pinter. The son of a Jewish tailor, Pinter grew up in the congested, polyglot and intensely familistic world of London's East End. His mastery of English contains elements of a quasi alien's act of assimilative will, an acute tuning of the ear to the language of success...
...lived in a tough neighborhood that was periodically invaded by Oswald Mosley's fascist bullyboys. Pinter remembers that as an adolescent, he had to run a gauntlet of broken milk bottles thrust menacingly at him. Not surprisingly, the boy's imagination was permeated by the Nazi massacre of the Jews. The threatened knock at the door, with the certainty of horrible punishment for an uncommitted crime, was a sound of terror in his mind before he ever recorded it on the stage...
Winning Humility. In approaching the substructure of Pinter's dramas, Esslin is appropriately psychoanalytical. To take a hard line on the "meaning" of a Pinter play is like taking a hard line on the meaning of a sunrise. In his play-by-play analysis, Esslin displays a winning humility. He is never arbitrary about imposing interpretations...
...core of a Pinter play is a room...
...prevailing Pinter image is blindness, used to denote loss of potency, status or life. Women in the plays are almost always presented in either the image of the "mother/madonna/housewife" or the "whore/maenad." Sometimes they merge, as in the character of Ruth who, in The Homecoming, leaves her husband and three children to become a very businesslike whore in the employ of her husband's father and brothers...