I had a feeling I might recognise the title somehow when I picked this up at the library, but mostly it was just one more Methuen series modern play to add to the collection. The all-male cast and dedication to Harold Pinter had me a little on my guard (and I was already having a bit of a wrong-side-of-the-bed day before I started reading) so it's possible that this deserves coming back to if I get the opportunity to see it performed - after all, it started at the National Theatre and hit Broadway for a while so clearly enough people in the world didn't think it was terrible... but I found it painful to read.
The writing style left me begging for a completed thought, or even a full sentence. It reads like the unedited transcript of a heated argument all the way through and while there's something to be said for sounding natural, the reason that style of speech works when you're actually arguing with someone is that both of you already know at least part of what's going on. Here no inflection, not even non-verbal interjections are left up to the directors or the actors, it's all right there in the script. In one run-on line, there are 3 different "lemme finish" type phrases chopped in to indicate that the other person in the scene is meant to be trying to interrupt. The entire script is full of italics, elipses and cut-off words and phrases. I had to go back and re-read the first two or three pages because I couldn't tell whether the first speaker was adressing the other guy on stage, or talking into a phone.
Ok, I'll take a breath here. It's not only the writing style that annoyed me. The entire story line seems to be a bunch of guys complaining that work sucks, and then one breaks in and sacks the office because the manager is the main cause of the suckiness. This solves exactly nothing and everyone still goes home angry. Great. So, what was the point?
I'll accept I may be missing something. I don't have a lot of experience in the sort of job these men have (though, I did do a week of cold sales pitching several years ago and yes, it is soul destroying - but mostly that drove me to go and do pretty much anything else and talk about anything else, when I was on my own time) and not being male myself, maybe I don't "get" the vast quantities of testosterone that seems to make up the bulk of Act 2. I know I get very uncomfortable listening to heated arguments and that may have also been part of what's so awkward for me about most of this play.
I knew starting out with this project that there would be some plays that were harder to get into than others. I know I'm a sucker for Shakespeare and particularly the language that goes with it - rediscovering a love of wordplay has been one of the best parts of this so far. I've pretty much universally struggled a little bit with anything that is written in dialect or very stylistically for certain speech patterns. If anything today's play cemented that thought. I feel pretty strongly that part of the joy of acting is taking the words on the page and bringing them to life, and that's a lot harder to do when every inflection and pause is written in for you. On the one hand it might look like dumbing-down the process, possibly making it easier to capture what the author was trying to say and taking the guesswork out of it. For me though, that takes away the creativity. It defines the character so much more narrowly and doesn't really leave room for the actor to find out who his character is on his own terms. This is partly my own instinct and partly what I feel strongly that I agree with from a number of interviews and such seen online. I had a similar reaction on an earlier review regarding an overly-directed script. I am pretty sure I'll come back to this line of thought again sometime, but I think that's enough for today.
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