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(Masood Mortazavi)


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20061009 Monday October 09, 2006

[ Art (هنر) ] Awakening

My daughter Yasmine, who enjoys fictional literature, rarely sees me read any.  So, she was very surprised to find me relax for half an hour this weekend reading Harold Pinter's A Kind of Alaska, in his Other Places, which I borrowed from our local library when we last visited it. "Plays are easier to go through and they can have so much to say in such simple ways," I explained to her. In fact, I've been reading several short plays recently, and Pinter (the winner of 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature) has enough of them to form a body of work worth a special study.

Having been inspired by Oliver Sacks' Awakenings, Pinter's A Kind of Alaska recreates a single experience of 'awakening' from encephalitis lethargica, a disease which spread through Europe in the winter of 1916-1917. Over the next decade some five million people fell to it with about a third of them dying. Some survived unscathed, others woke up from their 'sleep' by the drug L-DOPA some fifty years later.

I should add that in Pinter's Other Places, the play A Kind of Alaska precedes another called Victoria Station, which is a hilarious farce, the unfolding of which packs all kinds of meaning, which can only be uncovered in actual performances. In other words, the question "What is going on here?" can only be fully answered in real performances of the play.

2006-10-09 00:07:10.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

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