Volume 48, Number 15 · October 4, 2001
Harold Pinter's Celebration
By Daniel Mendelsohn
Harold Pinter Festival
presented by the Lincoln Center Festival 2001
July 16–29, 2001
The Spaces Between the Words: A Tribute to Harold Pinter
presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center
July 23–28, 2001
PLAYS BY HAROLD PINTER PRESENTED AT THE LINCOLN CENTER FESTIVAL
The Room
by Harold Pinter
(1957) Almeida Theatre, directed by Harold Pinter
The Homecoming
by Harold Pinter
(1964) Gate Theatre, directed by Robin Lefevre
Landscape
by Harold Pinter
(1967) Gate Theatre, directed by Karel Reisz
Monologue
by Harold Pinter
(1972) Almeida Theatre, directed by Gari Jones
A Kind of Alaska
by Harold Pinter
(1982 ) Gate Theatre, directed by Karel Reisz
One for the Road
by Harold Pinter
(1984) Gate Theatre, directed by Robin Lefevre
Mountain Language
by Harold Pinter
(1988) Royal Court Theatre, directed by Katie Mitchell
Ashes to Ashes
by Harold Pinter
(1996) Royal Court Theatre, directed by Katie Mitchell
Celebration
by Harold Pinter
(2000) Almeida Theatre, directed by Harold Pinter
At the climax of the 1990 Paul Schrader film The Comfort of Strangers, a young Englishwoman is forced to witness the murder of her lover. The attractive young couple, Mary and Colin (Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett), are in Venice for a restful, sexy change of scenery. One evening, after getting lost while looking for a restaurant, they encounter Robert, a wealthy local who scoops them up and takes them to dinner at his favorite out-of-the-way eatery, where he laughingly plies them with drink and tells them a lot of weirdly inappropriate stories about his private life. Most people, of course, would take the first decent opportunity to flee at the sight of Christopher Walken in a white suit, even if he weren't always repeating lines that, like Robert himself, are ostensibly harmless yet somehow deeply sinister. ('My father was a very big man.') But part of the film's macabre joke is that Mary and Robert are English, and hence diffident and accommodating to the point of self-destructiveness; more important, they're characters in a film written by Harold Pinter, in whose work everyday situations often devolve, with the irreversible momentum of nightmares, into horror. And so the couple get more and more involved with Robert and his equally unsettling, if overtly more sympathetic, wife, Caroline (Helen Mirren), who moves around their opulent palazzo gingerly clutching various body parts in pain, as if she's just been beaten. She probably has.
Review, 5569 words
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