Word: pinter
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...Pinter play, the questions are the answers. The denouement is total uncertainty. The audience knows less at the end than it thought it knew at the beginning. Harold Pinter provokes a devilishly clever sort of participatory theater in which the playgoer is lured into playing detective without any clues...
...surface is never the substance in Pinter. The plot is merely a presentment of an inner state of being, a translation from the unconscious. In The Party, Pinter is governed once again by his vision of woman as the sexual aggressor. The secretary is pallidly but visibly related to the praying-mantis wife in The Homecoming. The character of Sisson was almost perfectly described by Cyril Connolly in The Unquiet Grave when he wrote: "A puritan is incomplete because he excludes that half of himself of which he is afraid, and so the deeper he imprisons himself in his fastidiousness...
...Basement is a simpler play and almost too pat. A man named Law (Ted van Griethuysen) sits reading a book of illustrated Persian erotica. An old chum, Stott (James Ray), shows up. The pair chat in laconic Pinter fashion for a while, and then Stott asks if he can bring in a girl friend. Jane (Margo Ann Berdeshevsky) enters, and she and Stott promptly strip, get into Law's bed and make love. Law goes back to his book of Persian erotica...
...films are beginning, to provide Pleasence with a measure of artistic largesse. Next month, he, Pinter and Shaw, who have incorporated themselves as Glasshouse Productions, will sponsor a play by a young British writer named John Hopkins at London's Royal Court Theater. The plot is a parable of human guilt: a policeman kicks a child-murderer to death in his cell, thus becoming as bad as the killer himself. Pleasence's own acting ambitions are more conventional. "I'd really like to do a season of repertory with Shaw," he muses...
...always understood that I'd play the lead and that Harold Pinter would direct." Pleasence partially modeled his performance on a well-known, dictatorial movie producer, whom he prefers not to name. "I used him as a model for a quality I don't have-authority. I can't even get a waiter in a restaurant." Pleasence considers Goldman one of his three best performances-the other two being Davies in Pinter's The Caretaker ("I had the image of an alley cat in mind") and the title role in the Broadway production of Jean Anouilh...