Customer Reviews

Moonlight

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Being a long time Pinter fan I read Moonlight several times a while back with a view to staging it. The fact of someone dying in an unpeaceful, bitter way makes for a fairly gloomy canvas but Pinter succeeds in giving his dark protagonist a meaningful depth which hints at possible redemption, if not for himself then perhaps for his family. This pathos is offset brilliantly throughoutof the play by the subtley hilarious, sardonic repartee that characterises Pinter at his best. Andy, who is ill, lies in bed for most of the play and bickers nastily with his long suffering wife about their misremembered past and estranged children. The sons, in separate scenes on the other side of the stage attempt to unravel the meaning of their own dysfunctional lives and rivalry, thereby mirroring their parents while the daughter, in cameo appearances, is the vessel for all that is potentially good and redeemable in the family. I read somewhere that the play works on stage very well in its evocation of death and has the audience silently gripped during the denouement if done well.

I reckon that MOONLIGHT is Harold Pinter's modern update of James Joyce's classic tale, THE DEAD. Andy, the old pig reprobate who lies dying while his wife watches, apparently devoted to him but inwardly nursing a whole different set of feelings, -- Andy is a lot like Andy Sipowicz of the USA network cop show NYPD Blue. Ian Holm played the part in the premiere ten years ago and I imagine he was very good. Or you can picture Marlon Brando playing in MOONLIGHT along the lines of his part in LAST TANGO IN PARIS. Alas, those days are far behind us now. The wife is very secretive and you know she hasn't had a happy life having to put up with Andy's incessant vulgarity and prejudice, not to mention the way he arranged their family life so that their two sons are at each other's throats. The wife, Bel, bides her time and drops her bombshell just at the appropriate moment -- I don't want to give away any spoilers, but if you know Joyce's story "The Dead" you already know what kind of secret a wife can keep for many years. MOONLIGHT is a wonderful play and a good one for college productions too, though I wouldn't recommend it for high school due to the rough language and the advanced themes of aging, disintegration, and death. However many a young ingenue will thrill to be given the part of "Bridget," a real Audrey Hepburn "Ondine" role if ever there was one. A part Pinter is said to have based on the crazy mad Lucia Joyce.

"Once someone said to me-I think it was my mother or my father--anyway, they said to me--We've been invited to a party. You've been invited too. But you'll have to come by yourself, alone. You won't have to dress up. You just have to wait until the moon is down." Thus begins Bridget's climactic speech, one of the greatest monologues in the modern theater. Audiences eat it up like it was cotton candy.