AdminAssistant
12-26-2008, 04:48 AM
:(
Harold Pinter, quite easily the single most important playwright of the past 50 years, died today. *sigh*
His plays are so wonderfully...strange and twisted. Plot is secondary, it's the characters that are important. Characters with little background. The plays hardly ever end in a denoument. My personal favorite Betrayal, ends at the beginning, which I love.
I'm just sad. Contemporary playwrighting has, to be honest, gone down the shitter. There are a few people out there doing really good exciting stuff - Anna Deavere Smith, Suzan-Lori Parks, Paula Vogel, John Patrick Shanley. Sam Shepard is still writing, thankfully. But the rest is just angst. Crappy, uninteresting, poorly written, Neil LaBute-esque ANGST. Nowadays, playwrights are just concerned about being produced and making money and not making ART. When Pinter wrote The Birthday Party...no one else was doing anything like that, well not in Britain, at least. Pinter took the best parts of Beckett and Ionesco and combined them with the standard British drawing room play and turned it on its head.
And, I was just reading Theatre of the Absurd by Martin Esslin. He's the last one left! The last one of all those great writers like Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet. There are so few geniuses left in the world...and we just lost one of the greatest.
Harold Pinter, quite easily the single most important playwright of the past 50 years, died today. *sigh*
His plays are so wonderfully...strange and twisted. Plot is secondary, it's the characters that are important. Characters with little background. The plays hardly ever end in a denoument. My personal favorite Betrayal, ends at the beginning, which I love.
I'm just sad. Contemporary playwrighting has, to be honest, gone down the shitter. There are a few people out there doing really good exciting stuff - Anna Deavere Smith, Suzan-Lori Parks, Paula Vogel, John Patrick Shanley. Sam Shepard is still writing, thankfully. But the rest is just angst. Crappy, uninteresting, poorly written, Neil LaBute-esque ANGST. Nowadays, playwrights are just concerned about being produced and making money and not making ART. When Pinter wrote The Birthday Party...no one else was doing anything like that, well not in Britain, at least. Pinter took the best parts of Beckett and Ionesco and combined them with the standard British drawing room play and turned it on its head.
And, I was just reading Theatre of the Absurd by Martin Esslin. He's the last one left! The last one of all those great writers like Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet. There are so few geniuses left in the world...and we just lost one of the greatest.