SOURCE: Mendelsohn, Daniel. “Harold Pinter's Celebration.” New York Review of Books 48, no. 15 (4 October 2001): 28-32.

In the following review, Mendelsohn provides an overview of theater festivals paying tribute to Pinter, asserting that the Harold Pinter Festival ultimately “exposed Pinter's weaknesses and pretensions as much as it did his strengths.” Mendelsohn applauds Pinter's most recent work, Celebration, as both the funniest play he's ever written and his first “deeply and movingly political” play.

1.

At the climax of the 1990 Paul Schrader film The Comfort of Strangers, a young Englishwoman is forced to witness the murder of her lover. The attractive young couple, Mary and Colin (Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett), are in Venice for a restful, sexy change of scenery. One evening, after getting lost while looking for a restaurant, they encounter Robert, a wealthy local who scoops them up and takes them to dinner at his favorite out-of-the-way eatery, where...