Word: pinter
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Squalid, vicious, mean and stupid, Pinter's characters may seem to deserve all the bad things in life. They are certainly a thoroughly unsympathetic lot, and not one of them ever performs a generous act. They are animals, but first of all they are theatrical animals. They hold the stage like a military position. An actor long before he became a playwright, Pinter writes scenes with which actors can rivet an audience's attention. His stage animals circle and sniff and snarl and claw at each other, and the odor of vitality permeates the playhouse. These animals have...
...matter how sluggish they may appear, Pinter's people arrive on stage primed for combat, and words are their weapons. For a Tennessee Williams, language is a rhetorically scented bouquet of roses to be showered on an audience in fond profusion. To Pinter, language is sniper fire: laconic, staccato, precise, designed to cut down the people one hates. He uses two kinds of speech: words that are dead and words that can kill. The dead words are the burnt-toast banalities of daily life: "I've got your corn flakes ready. Here's your...
Where such playwrights as Christopher Fry and T. S. Eliot tried to pour drama into forms of poetry that could be swallowed as painlessly as prose, Pinter has achieved a more subtly musical poetry of rhythms, an antiphony of repetitions and pauses. Each of his plays seems composed, as well as written...
...glibbest assumption about Pinter-that he dramatizes the severed communication lines of modern man-is the least accurate. Not inability to communicate but unwillingness to communicate is his central theme. He argues: "I think that we communicate only too well, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility." And so, to Pinter's people, speech is a strategy for escaping detection. They reverse their statements and talk past other people...
With all this evasive action at the heart of his plays it is apparent that Pinter would rather transcribe a state of being than subscribe to a statement of belief. Still, it is possible to spot a few of the dimes of thought he is dancing on. They are all theatrical ideas, perhaps excessively so. Pirandello is his playwrighting godfather, and all of Pinter's plays could be subtitled "Right You Are, If You Think You Are." Like Pirandello, he believes that illusion is infinite and that truth and reality lie in the eye of the beholder. He assumes...