Month: March 2015
A short essay I wrote on Pinter, monologues and power, published in The New Yorker, March 6th 2015
In 1973, the BBC first broadcast a Harold Pinter play called “Monologue,” in which a man speaks for twenty minutes to an empty chair. It is a superficially casual address to an absent friend with whom, we gather, he shared a lover. Or, more likely, to whom he lost a lover. Beneath the surface gloss, the mood is spiked and bitter, and as the monologue unfolds the man looks more and more like someone flailing at sea.
Read the essay