Harold Pinter
alexandra.coghlan
This November, experimental theatre company Hydrocracker will bring The New World Order – a site-specific cycle of five Pinter plays – to a former government building in Hackney. Doubtless the immersive impact will add disquieting emphasis to Pinter’s dark tales of totalitarian power and abuse of authority, but if you prefer your Pinter a served a little straighter, briefer and with greater intimacy, then the Young Vic’s miniature double-bill One For The Road/Victoria Station offers a fairly devastating warm-up act.Not seen out in public together since Pinter himself directed their London Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I see there are still a few brave souls trying to peddle the "searing televisual masterpiece" line, often in high-profile BBC publications, but I suspect rather more of us may have been veering towards an ever-healthier scepticism as Hugo Blick's wilfully obtuse noirathon ran around in increasingly demented circles. I wouldn't go as far as theartsdesk commenter "Gengis Cohen", who characterises The Shadow Line as "dreadful plotless, sub-Pinteresque nonsense" before really warming to his theme... but after a couple of drinks, y'know, you start thinking maybe he's not all that wrong.Having Read more ...
fisun.guner
This is a play that begins after the end of an affair, and threads its precise, forensic way back to the very beginning of it. As the lovers are awkwardly reunited after two years, the theme of deceit as a web of competing and ambiguous claims is firmly established. Jerry, a literary agent, has learned that Emma, the wife of his oldest and dearest friend, with whom he had an affair for seven years, may now be having an adulterous relationship with one of his writers. Emma, played superbly by the mistress of sexy sang-froid Kristin Scott Thomas, casually but unconvincingly dismisses his Read more ...
Jasper Rees
His only previous visit to musical theatre was as Nathan Detroit in the Donmar’s West End production of Guys and Dolls. And now Lindsay sits in the sumptuous dressing room – it feels more like a small flat – at Drury Lane once occupied, he is proud to note, by the likes of Rex Harrison. The first role in which he caught the eye was as Mugsy, the eternally optimistic victim in Patrick Marber’s poker play Dealer’s Choice. There has since been a string of performances from the thuggish and/or yobbish end of the spectrum. He was a humourless torturer in Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman and the Read more ...
james.woodall
One wants to be antagonised by Harold Pinter. In his substantial early dramas (The Homecoming, The Caretaker, The Birthday Party), aggression and menace coil through the texts like rattlesnakes. He was, then, revolutionary. Maybe it's glib - critical shorthand - to suggest that there were, thereafter, two to three decades of falling away; but some of us might feel that much of his later work either became hijacked by his belligerent, unnuanced politics or, simply and contrastingly, softened.The latter charge cannot be laid against astonishing plays like No Man's Land (1975) and Betrayal (1978 Read more ...
theartsdesk
The relationship between stage and screen has always been fraught with antagonism and suspicion. One working in two dimensions, the other in three, they don't speak the same visual language. But recent events have helped to eat away at the status quo. On the one hand, theatre has grown increasingly intrigued by the design properties of film. Flat screens have popped up all over the place, notably in Katie Mitchell’s National shows and at the more ambitious work of the ENO. Meanwhile, theatre and opera have been encouraging those who, for reasons of distance or price, can’t make it to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On 10 October, 2010 Harold Pinter would have turned 80. To celebrate, a group of actors gathered in a room to read The Room, his first play, to an invited audience. Among those present was his widow Antonia Fraser.The play was introduced by Matthew Lloyd, artistic director of the Actors Centre and its in-house performance space, the Tristan Bates Theatre. Given that The Room was written when Pinter was still making his living as an actor it felt appropriate, he explained, that the celebration was being hosted by a venue where actors are able to hone their craft.The famous Pinteresque menace Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Only Fools and Horses, whose last new episode was broadcast to the traditionally bloated Christmas audience in 2003, has enjoyed several kinds of afterlife. It lives on lexically, in the form of the Peckhamspeak inherited by its viewers – “cushty” and “luvly jubbly”, “plonker” and “dipstick”. It is also frequently exhumed in clips packages and on repeat channels. Then came the spin-off sitcom The Green Green Grass, a fifth series of which is said to be in the pipeline. And now this: a prequel to Only Fools and Horses, a whole hour-and-a-half’s worth of back story explaining the birth of Read more ...
william.ward
It is almost an article of faith that over the 50 years since its first production, The Caretaker has become a classic of the British theatrical canon. Its carefully calibrated medley of deadpan, slapstick, and ennui, highbrow miserable-ism and low-pressure tragedy has evolved into a kind of Woolworths pick’n’mix from which subsequent writers for the stage, radio or television can select the bits they like, to confect something recognisably post-war British in generic mood and texture.To apply the term “Pinteresque” might have made sense when we were all still digesting those key elements of Read more ...
frank.johnson
Frank Johnson, the great parliamentary sketch-writer who died in 2006, was a passionate fan of opera and ballet. While intensely admiring certain artists, he kept eye and pen sharp for his observations of cultural matters, mocking cabals of opinion-formers in the arts as ruthlessly as he quilled politicians. These extracts from a newly published collection of his writings, edited by his widow Virginia Fraser, show both sides of him. 5 March 1989: Benjamin Britten's whimsicalities As an impressionable youth in the 1950s and early 1960s, I endured the unceasing propaganda of the Read more ...
theartsdesk
“Cricket was very much part of my life from the day I was born,” Harold Pinter once said, only partly joking. “There was a general feeling about cricket. In the 1930s the whole of England loved cricket, I think – that was my impression as a child, anyway, when I was six months old.” Pinter started playing cricket for Gaieties CC in the mid-1960s. The club was the creation of music hall star Lupino Lane. Lane had a residency at the (long since demolished) Gaiety Theatre on The Strand, so when he started a cricket team he naturally named it Gaieties.One school holiday Pinter took his son Daniel Read more ...
elaine.lipworth
Michael Caine has made more than 100 films: from Zulu, The Ipcress File, Alfie and Get Carter to The Italian Job and Educating Rita. He won best supporting actor Oscars for Hannah and Her Sisters and The Cider House Rules. This interview dates from 2007 when his more recent films were the remake of Sleuth with Jude Law and The Dark Knight. A sharp dresser, in black trousers and polo shirt, he was slim and fit and did not look 75, despite the lines and thinning hair. The actor lives in Surrey with Shakira, his wife of more than 30 years. They have a daughter, Dominique, and Caine also has a Read more ...