Sounds familiar, but I havent read it, who wrote it?

Sigs are so overrated. I would never think of us..uhm nevermind
Little Girl

Harold Pinter

It's about three men in a room. And it's about exciting as that sounds, too. The highlight of the play is a statue of Buddha getting smashed. The critics hail it as "giving us infinite riches in a small room", stuff like that, but they're just plain wrong

i think Patrick Stewart starred in The Caretaker in the West-End with Sue Johnson of The Royale Family fame

Edited by - Gowserpaul on 10/3/2004 12:00:04 PM

for heaven's sake, it's a masterpeice of claustrophobic tension. the physical violence just explodes as a counterpoint (and release) to the emotional and intellectual sparring that occupies most of the tale.

@Taw: Where exactly do you get all of these fascinating tidbits of information from? Over the past few days I've read all about your knowledge of art, music, human nature and now theatre. Most of your posts hardly suggest that you're some sort of beret-wearing pretentious culture snob and yet you drop names that I would bet many (if not most) posters - myself included - have never heard of (Pinter I do know; we had a PinterFest in my city a few years ago). Also, if your life story is to be believed, the parts of it that I am familiar with certainly do not suggest that your upbringing lent itself well to developing a well-rounded sense of style, for want of a better word (I'll admit that I'm being rather presumptuous here as I hardly know everything about you; I'm just working with what little information I have). I can't help but feel that I am missing something very important.

The main reason I ask is that a lot of your retorts to people's "uneducated" responses to various artforms often seem to be the sort of high-minded bafflegab that reviewers use to confuse the general public, with an indignant remark tacked onto the front. Of course some of your other posts do suggest that you aren't simply cutting and pasting from some obscure website. It's this dichotomy that has caught my attention. If all of your posts looked like simple regurgitations then I wouldn't have given them a second thought.

I don't mean to be rude or question your knowledge of and/or appreciation for culture. I'm also not trying to prove my own intelligence by going for a sort of "gotcha!" moment either. You've simply piqued my curiosity. Answer me if you so desire, I won't be crushed if you don't. Don't forget, I'm new here so if you've answered all of this before it's very possible I've simply missed it.

Edited by - CODENAME on 10/3/2004 9:00:20 PM

good questions! can't really answer without going into vast detail, and I've got to set off for work presently. even culture-snobs have to earn a crust

however I promise I will answer you properly and drop you a Tawmail.

Edited by - Tawakalna on 10/3/2004 11:44:00 PM

You've done it now CODE. Duck and cover!

Jolly good. I'm very interested to hear all about it. "Duck and Cover", eh Esq? Why would I want to do that?

EDIT:

Edited by - CODENAME on 10/4/2004 6:17:13 AM

You'll see when you get Taw's life story .

that sounds interesting. mind dropping me a tawmail?

@Taw: You may say its a masterpiece, but it's so dull. Nothing happens. 3 losers in a room doing utterley mundane things. It's about as good as another play I heard of called 'Bang!' or something which involves the curtain opening, a gunshot, and then the curtain closes, but even that was more original than this. Especially when you spend a whole year studying it and finding out why it is apparently funny, and how Pinter is supposed to be creating tension and menace, for every single scene of the play. Other highlights include how Davies, one character, does not belong, Mick's mood swings, and Aston's amazing inability to do any work. A friend mentioned to me that if you take the first letters of each of the characters names:
Mick
Aston
Davies

It reads MAD, which is what Pinter must have been to force 15/16 year old students to have to go through.

There, I feel much better, now off to write some pointless notes about some passage with the intention of writing an essay.

I def concur that having to learn it is awful and takes away any sense of surprise, which is what Pinter wanted. He's at his best imo when he did the BBc Play for Today's back in the 70's, man those plays were vicious, you knew the violence was coming and it would be cathartic but you never knew when? what was the one with the Englishman, Irishman, Scotsman and Welshman in the pub called? that was a real gripper that was, esp when they got the snooker cues out.

@Code. why such a dichotomy? because I'm from a working class background but never really liked popular culture. My parents were both highly artistic, my dad was a jazzman and my mum a ballet dancer when she was younger, but neither encouraged me and being utter freaks wanted me to be a priest *spit* so I found my own path in the arts.

I did mostly arts for higher education including a degree in design and a masters in History of Art, and yes I really am into all this stuff, modernism/post-modernism and I really do understand it (because I was taught to) however that doesn't mean I walk round as you say with a beret and a cigarette holder like some arty *luvvie* I'm just a regular slob with sprogs and a mortgage and a job like evryone else. besides I despise the arty set, they're so effing pretentious and talk such a pile of cr*p.

when we can me and Mrs Taw get down to the smoke for the exhibitions (we miss a lot ) and I have to laugh at the sh*te some of the snooty Home Counties twonks come out with. These people talk the talk but they actually know bog all, waffling on about zeitgeists when they don't even know what it is.

like most people I'm full of contradictions. I'm a political radical but a social conservative, a working-class slob with bourgeois tastes, i look like an ape and sing like an angel. go figure

I suppose if you were just to go and see the play, without having read it, and as long as it was performed well, it could be interesting, but I will never have this joy and so I am just reading things from my corner.