Harold Pinter (1930–2008)

This is an unusual work - a one act play by Harold Pinter. The topic has been covered in books and movies, such as Awakenings starring Robin Williams based on the book by Oliver Sacks. It is disjointed, unclear, and rambles as a middle-aged woman who has been in a coma since she was sixteen is brought back by administration of L-Dopa. The style seems to channeling Samuel Beckett, but no one can write Samuel Beckett as well as Samuel Beckett, and I would have tagged Harold Pinter as one of the least likely to write Samuel Beckett well. I was only partially write. The play works in small ways, but would probably leave an audience behind without the introductory material in the preface.… (more)

I'm not a big reader of plays, but I'd like to change that. This collection was bought for me with the intent of me reading a particular Harold Pinter play that, as it happens, isn't contained in the collection. Ah well. I've been dipping in and out for a few years and I've loved most of what I've read. Absurdism in many forms has often turned me off, but for whatever reason, Pinter's brand of social eccentricity works for me. Sometimes the plays here seem impenetrable, but most remain compelling regardless, and nearly all of them are entertaining. I typically prefer his early social satires to some of the more abstract, non-linear experiments that he favoured in his later years, but I think that lies more with my capacity for unravelling the themes than anything to do with Pinter.

Anywho, I'm sure I'll come back to some of these and I will almost certainly need to check out some adaptations. Recommendations welcome.… (more)

A three-hander first performed in 1978, with Penelope Wilton, Michael Gambon and Daniel Massey appearing in Peter Hall's original NT production. Jerry and Robert are best friends who studied together, play squash together, and both ended up working as publishers. They are both married and have children, but Jerry has had a seven-year-long affair with Robert's wife Emma. In a sequence of short, ambiguous scenes full of fragmented dialogue that never quite means what it says, Pinter digs back in time to explore different meanings of "betrayal", with each stage that we dig back into the characters' memories revealing another level of their dishonesty to each other and to themselves.

About as serious a take as it's possible to have on the banal topic of bourgeois adultery.… (more)