Word: slights
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ROOM and A SLIGHT ACHE inject Harold Pinter's special menace-and-dread serum directly into a playgoer's veins...
...rely on France. The U.S. says the same, and in the meantime expects Europe to rely on the U.S. Only Gaullist delusions of grandeur could suggest that reliance on the U.S. is not safer than reliance on France. But the common fault is that both Washington and Paris slight the ultimate goal of European unity while accusing each other of blocking...
...Room and A Slight Ache. Harold Pinter's plays not only have plots; they often seem to be plots. He conspires to elude, delude, tease, frustrate, irritate, and mystify the audience, all of course to a highly salutary end. Pinter leads the playgoer very far from home to signify that something at the mysterious heart of human existence consists in being precisely there-very far from home. The Room and A Slight Ache are early Pinter one-acters of quasi-comic menace, not always dexterous but distinctly absorbing, the work of a man forming his own indelible dramatic signature...
...Slight Ache lasts longer but makes its point quicker and clearer. Edward and Flora, a husband and wife, are enjoying a sunlit view of their country-house garden. He (Henderson Forsythe) is a scholar of distant cultures. She (Frances Sternhagen) is a busy suburban bee. Edward is obsessively irked by a human blight just beyond the garden, an aged, decrepit match-seller who haunts the forsaken site from dawn to dusk with no prospect of selling matches. Edward invites the old man into the house to have it out with him. The matchseller looks like a cross between a Skid...
...where characters are filled with the breath of death. The actors seem perfectly attuned to this death's dream kingdom, most notably Frances Sternhagen, who is scrupulously convincing as she shifts from the droning drab of The Room to the animated superficial niceties of professional wifeliness in A Slight Ache...