Sunday, December 28, 2008

Exit Playwright:

Many scholars have attempted to claim Pinter as a political writer ever since the 1980s, and those voices will likely become even more insistent now. But Pinter's best work is important for other reasons. It's difficult to even talk about his contribution to theater today, because the style of his early plays—with their mannered pauses and silences—is so much a part of the zeitgeist that it is more often a subject of parody than reverence. But from the Birthday Party in 1958 to Betrayal in 1978, Pinter's plays, like those of Eugene Ionesco and Pinter's mentor Samuel Beckett, changed the way we expect the theater to work.

12:01 AM