Pinter Critics

Question 1

Pinter on War/Cold War

Answer 1

Two people knocking at the door and taking them away…more and more real

Question 2

Cavendish on genre

Answer 2

Logic of a nightmare

Question 3

Billington on time

Answer 3

It is a private, obsessive work about time past; about some vanished world, either real or idealised

Question 4

Billington on Stanley

Answer 4

tantrum-filled child

Question 5

Billington on 1950s

Answer 5

the persistence of these questions tells us a lot about the culture of the 1950s in which works of art were still expected to provide rational answers

Question 6

Bill Naismith

Answer 6

the comic contrast of Jew and Irish man is pushed to the limit

Question 7

E.T Kirby

Answer 7

consciousness occupies and qualifies space

Question 8

Pinter on Goldberg and McCann

Answer 8

Goldberg and McCann? Dying, rotting, scabrous, the decayed spiders, the flowers of our society. They know their way around. Our mentors. Our ancestry. Them. Fuck ‘em

Question 9

Lloyd Evans

Answer 9

Goldberg and McCann are often performed as two halves of a double act but here they’re carefully differentiated

Question 10

Billington on Goldberg

Answer 10

Smiling bonhomie conceals a profound insecurity

Question 11

Ian Shuttleworth on Petey

Answer 11

comfortably nondescript

Question 12

Martin Esslin on Petey

Answer 12

tongue-tied…imbecility

Question 13

Cavendish on Lulu

Answer 13

a rather one-note brassy local lass

Question 14

Pinter on Stanley

Answer 14

spirit of defiance

Question 15

Shuttleworth on Stanley

Answer 15

palpable streak of viciousness

Question 16

Matt Oliver on Meg and Stanley

Answer 16

the ambiguous relationship between the two…is characterised by sudden shifts in power

Question 17

Matt Oliver on Stanley

Answer 17

instead of the deep, malevolent laughter of a villain, we hear the muffled ‘giggle’ of a boy in the darkness

Question 18

Pinter on language

Answer 18

language becomes a permanent masquerade, a tapestry of lies

Question 19

Times Critic

Answer 19

After a while we tend to give the puzzle up in despair

Question 20

Simon Henderson

Answer 20

In Pinter words are not bridges: they are bars to protect the wired enclosure of the self

Question 21

John Russell Brown on Silence

Answer 21

it is in the silences that they (characters) are most evident

Question 22

Esslin on Communication

Answer 22

communication is difficult if not impossible

Question 23

Pinter on meaning

Answer 23

meaning begins in the words…and ends nowhere

Question 24

John Russell Brown on comedy

Answer 24

[Pinter’s comedy] is about the same things as his scenes of terror, the inability…to make contact with each other

Question 25

Billington on Lulu

Answer 25

chiefly there to remind us of Goldberg’s predatoriness

Question 26

Matt Oliver on Games

Answer 26

the fact that Goldberg appears to be using the games as euphemisms for sex acts makes his interest in Lulu troubling, with strong suggestions of paedophilia

Question 27

Martin Esslin on Meg and Stanley

Answer 27

Meg treats him with a motherliness so stifling as to be almost incestuous

Question 28

Esslin on Meg

Answer 28

grotesquely playing the belle of the ball

Question 29

Shuttleworth on Meg

Answer 29

ageing coquette