The Playgoer: Pinter love-in, Day 2

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Friday, October 14, 2005

Pinter love-in, Day 2

So is this the weirdest Harold Pinter photo you've ever seen or what? It was on today's front page of the Times. Apparently this is current. As in yesterday. And it's not a costume for his star turn in Zorba the Greek. The caption explains the bandage is the result of a "fall", but, still, that doesn't explain the mustache...

The accompanying article by chief London correspondent Sarah Lyall is certainly an improvement from the initial rush-jobs appearing online yesterday. Ben Brantley's short-deadline appreciation is also perfectly fine, for now. (You'll have more fun with the nifty "audio slide show" option!) But I still await the more detailed and complex appraisals.

Then again, let's not eulogize the man already! Lyall's piece ends on a funny implicit critique of the habit:

There was a moment of exquisite discomfort on television on Thursday afternoon after the Nobel announcement was made, The Evening Standard reported.
"A Sky News presenter announced at 12:01 p.m. that Harold Pinter had died," the paper said, "before correcting herself, after a Pinteresque pause, and saying that he had in fact won a Nobel Prize."


The featured product on the right, by the way, is indeed the Peter Hall film of The Homecoming with Ian Holm and most of the original cast. Granted, production values are lacking and, as it was filmed a few years after the stage premiere, some of the actors may not be the right age. But what actors! An invaluable document of "the Pinter style"--or at least as codified by Hall in those landmark productions.


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