Tynan's Anger

So after years of loudly and obnoxiously bashing Harold Pinter to anyone who cared (or to people who didn't) I'm finally starting to see the error of my ways. University Theater here at the U of C did a fantastic rendition of The Homecoming, convincing enough that I'm tempted to see it again on Broadway. My bias towards Pinter largely comes from my father (if you've ever seen The Squid and the Whale, a lot of my opinions come from the same vein as arguing that A Tale of Two Cities is minor Dickens), and the fact that my the first Pinter play I ever saw was his first, The Room, which, while mirroring the chronology of the theater world's introduction to Pinter, is not exactly an easy introduction to a playwright for a 17 year old.

Probably another factor was that I was exposed to David Mamet at roughly the same time as Pinter. While both playwrights tend to use dialog as a weapon, Mamet is much more grounded in reality and easier to digest, and hence I naturally felt the assert Mamet's superiority in the theater of menace. Now, of course, with four years of college in me, I can come up with more sources of comparison. I see the parallels to Beckett, Ionesco, and the Angry Young Man movement. I see more apt American parallels than Mamet, such as Edward Albee and Sam Shepard (Buried Child, in my mind, is Pinter with a Midwestern accent). I can even see parallels with the more comical but still emotionally jarring playwrights like Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard. I still think Philip Roth deserves a Nobel Prize more, but I am less inclined to dismiss Pinter's Noble Prize outright. I also now really want to see Sleuth, and am frustrated that I don't have it On Demand in my apartment.

Labels: angry young man, david mamet, edward albee, eugene ionseco, harold pintet, joe orton, philip roth, sam shepard, samuel beckett, sleuth, the homecoming, tom stoppard