Harold Pinter in Madrid
You need three things: love for the theater, be in Madrid and understand Harold Pinter’s plays. If you have those 3 requirements then you will enjoy a night in the Teatro Español. Alfonso Ungría directs ‘Pinter‘ a double program that features: ‘A Slight Ache’ and ‘One for the Road’ two plays by Harold Pinter. The actors are: Chema Muñoz, Aitor Mazo, and Cristina Samaniego.
Harold Pinter was born in 1930 in East London,and is a famous playwright, director, actor, poet and political activist. Pinter has written twenty-nine plays including The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming, and Betrayal, twenty-one screenplays including The Servant, The Go-Between and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and directed twenty-seven theatre productions, including James Joyce’s Exiles, David Mamet’s Oleanna, seven plays by Simon Gray and many of his own plays including his latest, Celebration, paired with his first, The Room at The Almeida Theatre, London in the spring of 2000.
He has been awarded the Shakespeare Prize (Hamburg), the European Prize for Literature (Vienna), the Pirandello Prize (Palermo), the David Cohen British Literature Prize, the Laurence Olivier Award and the Moliere D’Honneur for lifetime achievement. In 1999 he was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature. He has received honorary degrees from fourteen universities.
Pinter’s interest in politics is a very public one. Over the years he has spoken out forcefully about the abuse of state power around the world, including, recently, NATO’s bombing of Serbia. His most recent speech was given on the anniversary of NATO’S bombing of Serbia at the Committee for Peace in the Balkans Conference, at The Conway Hall June 10th 2000.
A Slight Ache
It is a story of a bourgeois marriage splintering through the presence of a silent stranger. Edward and Flora sit in a garden bickering over the flowers and an irritant wasp. But it is only when they invite in a dirty old matchseller stationed at their gate that things fall apart. Edward bullies and seeks to dominate the balaclava-ed figure; for Flora he embodies the sexuality and motherhood denied in a loveless marriage.
One for the Road
The main character Victor, who has obviously been tortured, is being kept prisoner by a totalitarian regime and its willing officer Nicolas. Nicolas, a dapper government official in an unspecified country who makes his living questioning political prisoners between rounds of torture. He is, in a sense, a compilation of every Gestapo officer, crooked cop and vicious capo who has sneered, insinuated and bludgeoned his way through interrogations in films noirs and spy movies.
But Mr. Pinter adds layers of silk and sensuality to the prototype. He makes sure that we understand the tangled and unseverable bonds between power and eroticism in this gentlemanly gargoyle, who steadily drinks whiskey without ever seeming remotely out of control. Here is the pleasure principle at its most sinister, the human relish in sadism triumphant in a perfectly draped off-white suit.
Useful Information
Teatro Español
Calle Príncipe 25
28012 Madrid
Dates: 21-02-2007 to 18-03-2007
Price: from 11 euros to 15 euros.
Phone Booking: (24 hours) +34 902.10.12.12
Box Office Phone: +34 91.360.14.84
