Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw In 1960, Edward Albee and Harold Pinter were young playwrights whose work challenged theatrical convention and the expectations of critics and audiences. Both Albee’s brief two-hander, Fam and Yam, and Pinter’s lengthier one-act, The Dumb Waiter, received English language premieres that year — Albee’s at the Music Box Theatre on Broadway and Pinter’s at … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw The Birthday Party, Harold Pinter’s first full length play, opened in London in May 1958. Reviews were grim. Most critics, accustomed to the kitchen sink realism of writers like Sillitoe, Braine and Osborne, were incensed and/or bewildered by the non-sequiturs, contradictions and pauses in Pinter’s language, along with the murkiness of … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly “Why don’t you shut up, you daft prat?” says Lenny (Jason Downs, resembling young Malcolm McDowell) to his father, Max (Jude Ciccolella), in Guillermo Cienfuegos’ top-flight revival of Harold Pinter’s 1965 comedy The Homecoming at Pacific Resident Theatre. Read more… Now running through July 26.
Harold Pinter’s Betrayal may revolve around an adulterous triangle, but the tone and language of the play are as restrained, as understated and as famously precise as anything else in his poetically taut compendium of work. Read more… Now running through May 17.