General > Beckett, Bond, Pinter discussion
Pinter resources
Iain Fisher:
A good 18 page analysis, mainly looking at A Slight Ache and comparing it with the Bacchae.
www.ohiostatepress.org/Books/Complete%20PDFs/Burkman%20Dramatic/04.pdf
"...Edward, hidden behind his newspaper during the couple's ritual interchange, reveals himself as ridiculously out of touch with his wife and his surroundings.
…
Superficially, the scene is merely amusing as it captures the small talk of people who are enacting a breakfast ritual. On one level the couple indulges in the 'cross-talk" that Pinter believes people so often make in a "deliberate evasion of communication," but on another level the conversation displays a particular kind of withdrawal on Edward's part. When Flora insists that Edward knows perfectly well what grows in his garden and Edward insists that he does not, he is revealing very early in the play the nature of his blindness, the source of the "slight ache'' in his eyes. Edward is out of touch with things that grow, with the examples of fertility in his own garden. He is out of touch too with Flora, whose name reflects the garden over which she presides as a kind of goddess. Thus Edward, in his comic way, is from the first a candidate for the role of the year god who must die, the old king of ancient ritual who represents the dying winter season and must be sacrificed to make way for the new..."
Iain Fisher:
Pinter talks about his friend and fellow Nobel Prize winner Arthur Miller, just after Miller's death.
"He was a great playwright and a great man- and a great friend of mine. It's been a great shock to hear this news, although he was pretty old.
...
But he was also a highly dignified and an extraordinarily formidable man, an independent man.
He and I had a memorable trip to Turkey about 20 years ago when we met a lot of writers that had been in prison and had been tortured. I admired him tremendously for his independence and his clarity of mind.
...
I hadn't spoken to him over the last few months... and I'm absolutely flabbergasted to hear that he's gone.
He had a wonderful kind of velocity about him. He was as tough as a rock, really. He looked like a bit of a rock too. That was one of the other things that made him remarkable - his actual physical presence was quite formidable.
This certainly embodied itself when we both went to Turkey together for this memorable trip in which we were nearly arrested and there was a military decree out for our arrest in Istanbul.
We just managed to get away by the skin of our teeth
...
I'm pretty convinced he was writing until the day of his death. He was born with the pen in his hand."
The link is here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4258707.stm dated 11 Feb 2005.
Iain Fisher:
Part of Betrayal from a radio production
www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFC7gMqMaZg
Pretty dire- how to remove emotion from a play
Iain Fisher:
Sky News getting the Nobel Prize for Pinter all wrong, very Pinter-esque
www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5hcm-CZkKQ
Iain
Iain Fisher:
An interview with Pinter on youtube
www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOhgvsxed-s
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EgeeWw3lME
www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCoFbOzFAyE
Iain
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