Volume 46, Number 15 · October 7, 1999
Our Own Jacobean
By Fintan O'Toole
Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics
by Harold Pinter
Grove, 205 pp., $23.00
Ashes to Ashes
a play by Harold Pinter, directed by Karel Reisz. at the Gramercy Theater, New York, January 19-April 25, 1999.
Grove, 96 pp., $10.00 (paper)
The Hothouse
a play by Harold Pinter, directed by Karen Kohlhaas. at the Atlantic Theater, New York, February 25-March 27, 1999.
Grove, 160 pp., $12.00 (paper)
The Proust Screenplay: Remembrance of Things Past
by Harold Pinter
Grove (to be published in November), 208 pp., $14.00 (paper)
In early-seventeenth-century England, in the midst of what was supposed to be a golden age, young playwrights sounded a note of harsh discord. Against the myth of Elizabethan glory, they placed increasingly violent images of torture, of the abuse of power, and of profound psychological and political disturbance. Cyril Tourneur, John Webster, and others combined melodramatic action with brilliantly concentrated language, familiar issues with exotic settings, lurid plots with a fierce intensity of emotion and characterization. For a long time, critics could not decide whether their work was, on the one hand, utterly decadent or, on the other, profoundly moral.
Review, 5677 words
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