Harold Pinter (1930–2008)

Five stars although I'm not sure I would be able to read (or watch) it again anytime soon. Memorable, trippy, but also faintly depressing especially if you've ever interacted with someone like any of these three men.

What is it all about? Not easy to say. But it is absolutely fascinating pathos, absurdity, mental-illness, ineptitude, and self-preservation by paralyzed inaction. All within a cluttered, barely functioning room.

At the end of the play, two weeks later, everything is as it was show more when the play started. You've been introduced to the men only within the most claustrophobic confines and wonder how they must narrowly navigate the outside world so precariously. Characters Mick, Aston, and Davies have danced and parled, yet with no ultimate effect or change on the future of each of their lives. Mick will still be planning to use his van to get his business really going. Aston will work on that plug, bring home junk, and be ready any minute to build a shed. And Davies will, in bad shoes, still be a down and out old man with his papers over in Sidcup.

Wait, maybe one thing changed: the dripping into the bucket finally stopped. Or perhaps just paused, like the forever pause of these men's lives. show less

Recently reread. I can see that good actors would have a fine time with this. The dialogue is sharp and at times funny, but the play has that Pinter menace. Teddy, a philosopher, and his wife Ruth visit Teddy's family in London: the patriarch Max, Max's brother Sam, a chauffeur, and Teddy's brothers Lenny, a pimp, and Joey, a would-be boxer. Ruth turns out to be a former lady of the night. She makes a deal with Teddy's family to return to her old profession (and service the brothers), and show more Teddy returns back to his philosophy job in America.
Critical reaction to the play points to oedipal and freudian themes. I am undecided whether this is a callout for the role of women in 60s society or a misogynist take. Is it that Ruth can only have power by playing to male instinct?
I prefer Sam Shepard's treatment of a visit home, Buried Child. Equally dysfunctional, but somehow closer to where i live. show less

A masterful collection of one of the most distinct playwrights who ever lived. High praise, granted, and yes I'm woefully under-read in my theater and haven't seen as much as I should have. But this is something I hope to rectify as soon as time and sanity allow (living that grad student life).

Some specifics, Pinter's writing is brilliantly precise in delineating what's implied and what's left out completely. A true master of ratcheting up dread and tension, Pinter gives his readers (and show more audiences) just enough to apprehend the ripples of something bigger and (usually) more horrible rumbling just beneath the surface of the dialogue and setting.

Coming as I do from a mostly prose background reading this collection was a crash course in mood and ambiance, in showing such restraint that you become a master of manipulating your audience's sense of frustration, anxiety, and, yes, even comedy too. Black Comedy, Kafkaesque definitely, but akin to the spirit of the rest of his abilities as a writer, Pinter's humorous asides are as well calculated as a finely tuned watch.

Though maybe not as hammer to your face effective as his predecessor and friend Samuel Beckett, Pinter trumps his friend in subtly with taut prose that talks around a story, a point, a philosophy and even an ideology in a way that would make Ernest Hemingway jealous.

In summation, this is an incredible collection and one that I'm already sorry to see go (it was a rental) but I will not soon forget the effect Pinter evoked with his words, his nuances, his infamous pauses, and most memorably, his absences on me. In what was left out and left behind for the sake of what was to be implied and hinted at, whispered towards, Pinter truly has no equal. show less

One of a few plays I am happy to reread/rewatch. Harold Pinter's inspiration for this was his long-term affair with Joan Bakewell, and he has said how he felt betrayed when he learnt that Joan's husband had known about the affair for a long time and not confronted him. And a wonderful exposure of human nature in the first scene when Jerry says, having heard talk that his ex-lover is seeing another man that he felt irritation that no one gossiped about us like that. Funny and painful, sparse show more mundane dialogue and plenty of pauses that speak a thousand thoughts. And an arresting back-to-front structure, so the audience know more than the characters as the play progresses. Wonderfully thought-provoking about relationships and what we remember about ourselves. show less