Pinter and the Prize
Terry Teachout has what should be the last word about Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize for Literature.
posted by Kate Marie | 9:05 AM | Permalink
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8 comments
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8 Comments:
Just as Nobels should NOT be awarded because of politics, neither should they be WITHHELD because of them. I agree with that point. I admire Pinter as a playwright. Just after graduation from College, I appeared as "Goldberg" in a production of The Birthday Party. I loved that freaky play.
"Just as Nobels should NOT be awarded because of politics, neither should they be WITHHELD because of them."
-- Exactly, Stewdog -- though, given the artistic unworthiness of some of the recent recipients, I wonder, with Teachout, whether it was Pinter's early drama or his late puerile "poetry" that counted most in the judges' minds.
Amen, Stewdog. Jimmy Carter and Yasser Arafat earned their peace prizes, the hell with politics.
Good point, CIV, but of course the Peace Prize is a horse of a different color. It practically cries out to be used as a politcal statement. Which makes it a joke, of course.
I'm not at all familiar with Pinter's plays, so I really don't have any basis for judging his works on their literary merits, but one of the things I keep hearing is that he was vital to the theater in the past half century. I know that's meant as praise, but I'm not sure it really is, not at a time when the theater has dwindled down to a few mass-audience entertainments and a lot of pretentious, unremarkable, and often ham-handedly political junk for a tiny and self-selecting audience of theater-goers. Occasionally I hear someone here in town tell me that some obscure new play is "important," but after I see the play--or, more often, read reviews--I'm only that much more convinced by the irrelevance of theater in a multimedia age. And when the hottest thing on the London stage is the utterly juvenile, anti-American, and ultimately outdated "Jerry Springer: The Opera," attended by allegedly educated people, I'm not sure that winning a Nobel as a dramatist is really even all that significant. Being the best playwright of the last 50 years seems no more meaningful than being, say, the best orthodontist in Dublin, Ohio.
Jeff, I think you've just insulted all the orthodontists in Dublin, Ohio. :)
I probably should have picked a better example. I hear orthodontists have come a long way since they tormented me with rubber bands and metal back in the early 1980s. They'll have their own Nobel any day now. ;)
How about Helen Thomas: The Opera?
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