Theatre Review: " Betrayal " by Harold Pinter, Jungle Theatre, Mpls, (www.jungletheatre.com)

Last weekend I had the pleasure of seeing the play Betrayal by Harold Pinter at The Jungle Theatre in Uptown in Mpls. I had known nothing of Harold Pinter, but he won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 2005. If you click on the post you can access some info on his plays and his awards. He has been a very outspoken critic of human rights abuses and this activism goes back at least 20 years when he wrote the play Mountain Language which was inspired by the oppression in Turkey and the suppression of the Kurdish language.

I loved the play. See it if you can. What stunned me was his introduction in the playbill. Mr. Pinter spoke of the difference between "truth" in art versus "truth" in politics.

He says of "truth" in art or literature, "Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive....The real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, reflect each other...tease each other are blind to each other. "


....Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians...are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed....."

"Betryal" is about that tapestry.

I have been approached by all sorts of folk lately, from relatives to fellow bloggers asking me about some of my sketches or stories, and whether all the facts are exactly correct. Particularly, the sketch in "The last latte," some have asked which relative this might have been. Excuse me. It was a fictional sketch.

In the sketches or stories of the blog, there is nothing but grey, and indeed my fair readers have very different views of the same story. That is as it should be.

On the political side, I BEGIN the reporting of the story. You may notice that in local politics that I often don't get the story right and that officials interject with corrections. That is what it is all about. They are writing the story too. That is the whole point of the blog.

I am not as pessimistic about politics as Mr. Pinter. I think that something good can come of difference.

So, to summarize. As my brother puts it as to my stories and sketches, "Dick never lets the facts interfere with the story."

As to the political stuff, YOU are writing the story. I am just starting the story. The facts we can debate about. The reality we can debate about. That is what life consists of.