9 thoughts on “Harold Pinter”

  1. Arnab is a blog fascist. I’m going to post on books I’ve read, food I like, and crap I found between my toes, just to rile him up.

    Pinter wrote an amazing screenplay for The Comfort of Strangers, still one of the creepiest Christopher Walken performances I’ve ever seen….and that’s really saying something.

  2. I’m with Mike–except for the toes. for one thing, I like them french fried ‘taters, mmm hmmmm. and for another, how can we keep living in a society where Mariah Carey gets 8 grammy nominations?

    as for Pinter, he’s a great playwright and a great writer of abuse–please check out the superb No Man’s Land. His plays are also the model for my teaching style: ambiguous, full of unsettling pauses, and tinged with a sense of menace.

  3. Perhaps its on a movie blog because Pinter is the first individual to win a Nobel Prize in Literature who also wrote numerous screenplays, directed films for the BBC as well as acting in films and on the stage. I saw him and Liv Ullmann perform together in Old Times, which Pinter directed, in LA in 1986.

  4. gio—are you sure? it would be a punishing modernist lesson, obscure and unresolved.

    what’s panto? is it some kind of curry? I like the theater where they tell good stories, and maybe have somebody sing Rosemary Clooney songs while ice skating…helps, too if they’re topless.

    I am not Reynolds, though I’m not not Reynolds, if you follow me.

  5. David Krasner writes:

    What makes Pinter a most worthy prize winner is the fact
    that his plays, early or late, concern double-speak,
    linguistic coercion, half-truths, deception, betrayal (and
    even a play titled such), chicanery, manipulation with
    language (and with silence), brutality, cruelty, and
    falsehood. Pinter can be credited with influencing Mamet,
    Shepard, Churchill, and a host of other late-20th century
    playwrights. He captures in pithy and concise language the
    Orwellian canards of the current [Bush] administration likely better than anyone.

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