Word: playgoers
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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...
...meaning will lie in the eye and mind of the beholder. The mirror is the message. The playgoer will see what he wants to see, which, even in these lesser plays, is Harold Pinter's subtlest hold...
...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...
...Donald Pleasence is this play's best excuse for being. Smirking, storming, giggling, cringing, screaming, he is wild, weird and wonderful. Pleasence knows how to invade a playgoer's mind like a neurotic blood relative whom one cannot abide and yet cannot disown. He has the hallucinatory reality of a dream from which one cannot awaken. He provides one of those rare performances that theatergoers will never stop talking about...
...taking gross liberties with the classics to give them contemporary credence. A U.S. audience is more likely to feel the faint shock of cultural lag. Freshly attuned to the theater of tribal intimacy, with its skin-to-skin actor-audience confrontations and its stereophonic barrage of sound, a playgoer may be startled to see a stylized drama in which each line is pruned, each gesture sculptured, each scene framed...