Word: pinter
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...actor and a director are the play's most impressive assets. In the central role, Donald Pleasence gives a performance of atomic power and blinding virtuosity; Harold Pinter directorially chills the stage to doom temperature. The very first scene bursts on the playgoer with somber eclat. In an elegant private chapel, dim as a catacomb, a finger of light rests on Pleasence as he kneels rapt in prayer. The Verdi Requiem saturates the air like incense. Suddenly, the stage is ablaze with light, louvers are turning, and the backdrop becomes a penthouse view of Manhattan's skyscrapers...
...acridly anti-Semitic remarks. With bewildering rapidity, his accented spray of words veers from the clever to the vulgar to the mad. In a sense, Goldman is the kind of Angst-ridden creature a very bright student might have constructed after making a close study of how Harold Pinter fashions his characters. Since Shaw acted the mentally disturbed older brother in Pinter's The Caretaker, the influence is scarcely surprising...
...German, I'm not rich. I had the script for a year. I read Hannah Arendt's book on Eichmann, his testimony at the trial, histories of the war -anything relevant. But Goldman isn't a symbol of Eichmann, Christ, or anyone else. I agree with Pinter. This is a play,' he said at the first reading, 'about a Jew who pretends to be a Nazi and finally turns out to be a Jew. Right? Now let's get on with...
...GLASS BOOTH, by Robert Shaw, who played Henry VIII in the movie Man for All Seasons. Starring Donald Pleasence. Playwright Harold Pinter directs. A surrealistic shocker about expiation and an Eichmann-like character on trial in Israel...
...have a complex but a fate. Once analysis of motivation supplants action, the result is soporific drama, as exemplified this season by Anderson's I/ Never Sang for My Father and Chayefsky's The Latent Heterosexual. In contrast with the look-through transparency of these playwrights, Harold Pinter maintains a tantalizing and fascinating opacity in his characters. They are inexplicable and unpredictable as people in real life often...