Tag: Harold Pinter

It’s been a long time. Too long.

Between family drama and… more family drama, it’s been a challenging time. The holidays always tend to throw a wrench into things too. For now, some linky goodness -thoughts on a few things that have been sitting on online tabs now for ages, and deserve a line or two.

First, and most recently, Harold Pinter has died. Pinter was one of the most important playwrights of the twentieth century, and, for many of us drama students, was our first introduction to truly disturbing characters. Disturbing, because they said so little, but conveyed so much. Silence, in Pinter’s hands, became a weapon, a shield, an absolute zero, to be placed within any and every concept of one’s choosing. From his written work, he seemed to love actors -and he trusted them. I workshopped scenes for Old Times during my time living in London, England, reading the part of Anna. I’ll never forget the whirlwind of possibilities that swirled around a perfect eye of stillness within Pinter’s writing. It was after that experience that I began to realize just how much Pinter changed the course of modern drama. Grazie, Harold.

Switching gears, this article from the Guardian examines the changing role of theatre writing and criticism in the internet age. Fascinating, challenging, compelling. Being a person who cares deeply about the intersections between culture and technology, I am still flummoxed at the level of ignorance displayed by those in … let’s just say other, arts-related areas, who ought to be more concerned about reaching new and younger audiences. Internet reporting is going to become the cornerstone in arts reportage, and yet there still exists this strange attitude (is it endemic to the Canadian persona?) that online reporting isn’t somehow as relevant or “real” as print or broadcasting. Well, I guess it depends who you’re marketing to, and writing for. Rule #1 of writing: know your audience. But to quote the article’s author, Andrew Dickson (bold mine):

it’s important for editors to commission robustly independent reviews; but it’s also important for us to encourage differing opinions, and allow people to tell us about things we’ve missed, whether the price of tickets or the horrors of restricted-view seats. Yes, we should support specialist voices and encourage experienced judgment, but we shouldn’t allow theatre critics to become isolated from what’s happening in other art forms or the wider world. Yes, we should care about the written word and encourage it to flourish – but we must also experiment with other ways of reaching audiences too, whether it’s via video, social networking, Twitter, or whatever else is waiting round the corner. Yes, we should cover shows when they open, but we shouldn’t shackle ourselves to a diary decided in advance by PR companies, as if every performance after press night wasn’t worth bothering with.

While we’re on Twitter, a fascinating article from the New York Times about the mini version of blogging; I have a theory Twittering could be the next big trend in arts criticism and writing. Can you imagine reading Twitters on the latest theatre shows, concerts, films, even television? And then gathering up a bunch of Twitters on the same? Talk about a conversation-starter (or two). The possibilities are endless.

So is print really dying? Or is it -like radio -just re-defining itself and its audience? Here’s a good piece on how employees of Denver’s newspaper, The Rocky Mountain News, are using the internet to try to save their paper. Interesting, how it takes a crisis to provoke a marriage -it’s usually the other way around, but in these times, everything is gone topsy-turvy. I still wonder what print writers -specifically arts journalists -think the whole online/print/economic situation might ultimately mean for them (us). I ran into a major Toronto critic who works in both print and radio earlier this month; she said her outlets are “going the way of the doh-doh bird” and encouraged me to continue pursuing online opportunities. Who knows, she said, “I could be working for you someday.” It was the weirdest compliment ever, and, come to think of it, quite Pinter-esque.