New Pinter Radio Play on Torture and Interrogators to Air
The plays from which he has culled his lines share a preoccupation with the power relationship between bully and victim, torturer and tortured, master and slave. Against a backdrop of unspecified totalitarian states, Pinter focuses on interrogators, torturers and guards and their violent mistreatment of innocent prisoners.
The broadcast will be accessible on streaming audio live. Here's an interview with Pinter. Metafilter has this description:
In One for the Road, the protagonist is Nicolas, a whisky-sodden interrogator who has brought in a family for questioning (and, it is implied, raping and torturing). In the short, sharp shock of The New World Order, we eavesdrop on a conversation between two torturers, held over the top of their mute, blindfolded victim's head ("We haven't even finished with him. We haven't begun."). In Ashes to Ashes, the interrogation of Rebecca by Devlin takes a sinister turn as we learn that her ex-lover participated in state-sponsored violence. In Mountain Language, a sadistic guard plays power games with a group of mountain dwellers, who are forbidden from speaking in anything but the language of the state. In Party Time, Pinter lampoons the smug security of the middle classes, portraying an insufferably élite party which carries on regardless of the violence and terror on the streets outside.
Now, for Pinter's 75th birthday, some of the tormentors and the tormented so potently etched in his later plays are assembled together in a new dramatic work with a musical setting by the composer James Clarke.
| < Racial Profiling For Terrorists is Racism | Friday Funnies > |
