Word: pinter
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...HOMECOMING is the season's most tantalizing drama, by Harold Pinter, who prods and arouses with the twin-tined fork of shock and humor. Vivien Merchant leads the Royal Shakespeare Company through a moody production in which even the pauses are eloquent...
Leland Moss directs an unfortunately wishy-washy version of The Collection. So long as he keeps the air free of dramatic pauses the dialogue has the porcelain sparkle that is Pinter's cache. But from time to time the actors forget they are in a Pinter play and try to make us understand what they are feeling. When that happens torpor floods the stage and it seems that the puzzling plot and symbolism just aren't worth the trouble...
...Pinter's characters are, to a man, stick figures. They are threadbare solipsists, suspended over an abyss. They know, and we learn, that if any one of them makes too loud a sound all will tumble in. Each speaks a private language, packed with private symbols as inscrutable to the other characters as to us. It is a measure of their cardboard substance that we are not surprised if any one of them gives a silly giggle and drops to the stage, dead as cold toast...
...power and the humor in all of Pinter's plays come from the presentation of this isolation and fear. The audience is free to conjecture relations homosexual or relations heterosexual, to pick out a symbol here or observe some principle of psychology. But the characters, Pinter tells us, live as do figures in our world: within themselves, fearing the open door through which can pass the undefined menace, never laughing. How can they laugh? Listening only to themselves, they always miss the punch line, or don't realize when they've spoken...
...Pinter and Beckett, the poster says, Pinter and Beckett it is. Not the best of their plays, not the best of productions, but good enough on both counts to make the evening worthwhile...