Word: pinter
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Caretaker--Pinter, Losey and Donald Pleasance. Through Saturday at the BRATTLE...
...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...
...surface is never the substance in Pinter. The plot is merely a presentment of an inner state of being, a translation from the unconscious. In The Party, Pinter is governed once again by his vision of woman as the sexual aggressor. The secretary is pallidly but visibly related to the praying-mantis wife in The Homecoming. The character of Sisson was almost perfectly described by Cyril Connolly in The Unquiet Grave when he wrote: "A puritan is incomplete because he excludes that half of himself of which he is afraid, and so the deeper he imprisons himself in his fastidiousness...
...Basement is a simpler play and almost too pat. A man named Law (Ted van Griethuysen) sits reading a book of illustrated Persian erotica. An old chum, Stott (James Ray), shows up. The pair chat in laconic Pinter fashion for a while, and then Stott asks if he can bring in a girl friend. Jane (Margo Ann Berdeshevsky) enters, and she and Stott promptly strip, get into Law's bed and make love. Law goes back to his book of Persian erotica...
...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...