Tom Stoppard (70), Horton Foote (91), Edward Albee (80). Now The Times has a profile of Harold Pinter (77) who has written many spectacular things, most recently the screenplay for Sleuth, a remake of an earlier film based on a 1970 play, not Pinter’s.
Says The Times of Sleuth (Jude Law and Michael Caine fight over Michael Caine’s wife) — “spare, sometimes cryptic language, significant pauses and another familiar quality of Pintner’s work: a hint of menace lurking beneath the surface.” Says the Financial Times of Pinter’s work in general, ” … dark hints and pregnant suggestions, with the audience left uncertain as to what to conclude.”
Pinter won the Nobel for Literature a couple years ago and gave a brilliant speech, brilliant. What was overlooked in the coverage of that speech, was his beautifully eloquent description of the creative process — how his stories and characters come about.
“I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. This is what they said. This is what they did.
Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.
The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is ‘What have you done with the scissors. The first line of Old Times is ‘Dark’.
In each case I had no further information.
In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn’t give a damn about the scissors, or about the questioner either, for that matter.
‘Dark’ I took to be a description of someone’s hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter.”
What did get plenty of press was the second half of Pinter’s Nobel speech. One of the themes of the talk, titled “Art, Truth & Politics” was, obviously, truth and he found the United States lacking in it. You must read the whole speech, if you haven’t. Excerpts can’t do it justice.  And read the Times profile, too, and then go see Sleuth, why not. There are worse ways to kill a day than watching Michael Caine and Jude Law match wits.
Harold Pinter Nobel Speech, “Art, Truth and Politics
“Still Pinteresque” (New York Times
 … Giant, bear-sized spiders are invading the pool, there’s a slew of them. Huge black furry things. They come out from the bushes at night, I guess, jump in, are sunk to the bottom by morning.  And still alive! They can be there for days and if you pull one up in the net to really freak yourself out, its fat hairy legs still move! I’ve never seen anything like them, so I googled “giant spiders in my pool” and found this interesting site, made up of people, like me, creeped out by spiders. Though none in the pool.