Word: pinter
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Thus, at the center of the contemporary stage remains the European drama represented by Beckett, lonesco, Genet, Pinter and Osborne. None are alike; yet all raise a hemlock toast to the 20th century. Theirs is a drama of metaphysical anguish, rigorous negation, asocial stance, skin-prickling guilt and anxiety, and abidingly absurd humor. In their plays, the situation of man is horrible and funny at the same time. Ionesco says that man laughs so as not to cry. The problem these playwrights pose is man's oldest and newest-the existence problem...
...Osborne is a frenetic machine gunner with words, Harold Pinter is the coolest of snipers. The rooms in which most of Pinter's plays take place crackle with laconic menace. In The Birthday Party, which has echoes of Hemingway's The Killers, two agents come to a rooming house, rough up one of the lodgers, and then take him for a ride. No explanation. Pinter knows that violence is more terrifying without reasons. No victim knows his hour, no executioner the source of his orders...
Riddled with guilt and anxiety, Pinter's people are Kafkaesque in that they cannot evade, placate, or even contact the unseen powers. He deals in archetypes that subtly evoke family figures, fathers and sons, brothers and sisters. The two brothers who take in and then evict the scrofulous bum in The Caretaker might be doing it to their own father. Pinter's characters are both strange and familiar with one another, as members of a family are. There is a trace of incest in his plays, and his characters take cover behind a smoke screen of language that...
...their distinct regional accents like badges-it is no longer necessary to affect an Oxford accent to get ahead. Some of the new voices have a cockney lilt; from London's own working-class East End come Actors Michael Caine and Terence Stamp, Playwrights Arnold Wesker and Harold Pinter, Television Magnate Lew Grade, Textilemen Joe Hyman and Nikki Seekers. Others breeze in from the coal-mining North Country. There are bluff Yorkshiremen like the P.M. or Actor Peter O'Toole, Albert Finney from Manchester, Playwright Shelagh Delaney, who wrote A Taste of Honey in Salford...
Freudenberger designed his own set and lighting. By opening the supposedly cluttered, cooped room into a wide, multiwalled affair, he made on deviation from Pinter's detailed textual description of the room. Since most of the business hovered near the walls, the actors had to make some agonizingly awkward walks across an eternity of space at crucial moments...