two kinds of silence
My favorite playwright and the most inspirational dramatist I've ever read, Harold Pinter, died last night. According to wikipedia, the man wrote twenty-nine plays, fifteen dramatic sketches, twenty-six screenplays, a novel and countless poems, essays, and more. He won the Nobel Prize, among other accolades. He was the bridge between Beckett and Mamet, literally, and his intriguing and stylistic approach was the apex of my interest in "absurdist plays."
He wrote in a style called "The Comedy of Menace," and was once famously quoted (glibly) as saying his work was about "the weasel under the cocktail cabinet," and although he also famously tried to take it back (apparently the quote has dogged him his entire career), it sums something up about the way people speak to each other in the Pinter world, the hidden, unspoken, never-defined subtext. He said he hated stories which spent forever showing every character's motivation and backstory, that that was an unrealistic approach to drama. In real life we never fully know why people do anything -- we never really know anyone that well -- and he sought something similar in drama.
One thing plays had in common: you were supposed to believe what people said up there. If somebody comes in and says, "Tea or coffee?" and the answer is "Tea," you are entitled to assume that somebody is offered a choice of two drinks, and the second person has stated a preference. [With Mr. Pinter there are alternatives,] such as the man preferred coffee but the other person wished him to have tea, or that he preferred the stuff you make from coffee beans under the impression that it was called tea.
-- Tom Stoppard (from the linked NYT article)
Pinter is one of the most influential writers on my view of drama, narrative, and characterization, and he is one hell of a fun read. I'd give anything to see his plays actually performed (and I believe later this year Betrayal is finally being put on again in Portland), and I am sad to hear of his passing.
Let's all, please, take one last "Pinter pause" in the honor of a great thinker.
Following the deaths of Majel Barrett and of course, my friend Ken Meyer, this season's been a bit bleak. Christmas, though simple, has been otherwise good so far. I will probably come on later to say something about it, though short of a list of "what I got," I'm not sure exactly what there is to say.