Moonlight

2011 | Film & TV

"A dark, elegiac play, studded with brutally and swaggeringly funny jokes." (Sunday Times). "A deeply poignant, raffishly comic, emotion-charged study of the gulf between parents and children and the anguish of approaching death...Beckett, the poet of terminal stages, inevitably comes to mind. What instantly moves one is Pinter's image of a man confronting death in a spirit of rage, fear and uncertainty...The piss-taking Pinter humour and the undercutting of verbal pretence are all there. But what makes this an extraordinary play is that Pinter both corrals his familiar themes - the subjectiveness of memory, the unknowability of one's lifelong partner, the gap between the certain present and the uncertain past - and extends his territory. He shows, with unflinching candour, that in an age shorn of systems and beliefs we face "death's dateless date" in a state of mortal terror." (Guardian). "Pinter has written few more fascinating plays." (The Times). First staged at the Almeida Theatre, London, in September 1993, Moonlight was revived at the Donmar, London, in April 2011. "The foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the twentieth century."

(Swedish Academy citation on awarding Harold Pinter the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2005).

Harold Pinter (Author)