Reviews for Moonlight

The average rating for Moonlight based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-05-29 00:00:00 James Boyle Moonlight is a play written by Harold Pinter in 1993. Upon its premiere, it stood out in Pinter's body of work because it was the first full-length play he had written in 15 years after a number of shorter ones, and it avoided the political themes that had been preoccupying him of late. Essentially this is a tale of family estrangement as the patriarch lies dying. Andy, a man in his fifties, claims to be on his deathbed and asks his wife Bel where his sons and his daughter are in his last moments. His account of his situation and his look back at his life are marked with a kind of fury and bitterness, the old image of the working-class man who complains towards the end of his life that he never got any respect: Andy: I'll tell you something about me. I sweated over a hot desk all my working life and nobody ever found a flaw in my working procedures. Nobody ever uncovered the slightest hint of negligence or misdemeanour. Never. I was an inspiration to others. I inspired the young men and women down from here and down from there. I inspired them to put their shoulders to the wheel and their noses to the grindstone and to keep faith at all costs with the structure which after all ensured the ordered government of all our lives, which took perfect care of us, which held us to its bosom, as it were. I was a first-class civil servant. I was admired and respected. In another location, his sons Jake and Fred chat. These two characters' dialogue is distinguished by wordplay that never lets up, logorrhea, and a sort of inability to take anything seriously. As Jake speaks of his father's old plan to leave his estate to him: Jake: The vicar stood up. He said that it was a very unusual thing, a truly rare and unusual thing, for a man in the prime of his life to leave - without codicil or reservation - his personal fortune to his newborn son the very day of that baby's birth - before the boy had had a chance to say a few words or aspire to the unknowable or cut for partners or cajole the japonica or tickle his arse with a feather - Fred: Whose arse? Jake: It was an act, went on the vicar, which, for sheer undaunted farsightedness, unflinching moral resolve, stern intellectual vision, classic philosophical detachment, passionate religious fervour, profound emotional intensity, bloodtingling spiritual ardour, spellbinding metaphysical chutzpah - stood alone. Fred: Tantamount to a backflip in the lotus position. Jake: It was an act, went on the vicar, without a vestige of lust but with any amount of bucketfuls of lustre. However, Moonlight is more than a straightforward depiction of family estrangement, it is tinged with mystery. The facts set out by Andy about his family don't seem to accord with the past that Fred and Jake describe. (This is not the first time Pinter has had two sides of a family that don't jive and seem to be living in separate realities; see his earlier short play Family Voices). An ethereal quality is brought by Bridget, the daughter, who appears only in a couple of scenes, alone and outside the action of the two sides of the family in their respective locations. She delivers a curious monologue which gives the play its title. In my opinion, Harold Pinter was doing some of his best work in these years, and I greatly appreciated his turn to the political. But Moonlight fails to move me as much, being a bit too mysterious and never firmly establishing Bridget's role and message. As always, Pinter has a fine way with words and there's some laughs, so this is worth reading if obtained as part of a collected plays (like Faber & Faber's Plays 4). And who knows, perhaps in a live staging it all works more effectively than read off the page.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-04-16 00:00:00 Michael Smith Moonlight hakkında bazıları Harold Pinter'ın en iyi işi olduğunu bazılarıysa diğer oyunlarının yanında oldukça sönük kaldığını söylüyor. Hangisinin doğru olduğuna karar vermek oldukça zor çünkü metin farklı düzlemlerde anlatılan zamanı birbiri ardınca ilerlemeyen sahnelerden oluşuyor. Oyunun örgüsünü kurmaksa sezgilere kalıyor. Ve Bridget tam bir belirsizlik. Oyun Bridget'ın dokunaklı konuşmasıyla sona eriyor. "Bir gün biri bana sanırım annem , ya da babam her kimse bana bir davete gidiyoruz demişti. Sen de çağrılırsın. Ama senin kendi başına, yalnız gelmen gerekiyor. Süslenmen gerekmez. Yalnızca ay batana dek bekleyeceksin. Davetin nerede olduğunu bana söylediler. Bir yolun sonunda bir evdeydi. Ama bana ay batana dek, davetin başlamayacağını bildirdiler. Eski bir giysi giydim ve ayın batmasını bekledim. Uzun süre bekledim. Sonra o eve doğru yola çıktım. Ay pırıl pırıldı. Çok sakindi. Eve vardığımda ev ay ışığına bürünmüştü. Ev, orman içindeki açıklık, yol, tümü de ay ışığına bürünmüştü. Evin içi karanlıktı. Tüm pencereler karanlıktı. Ses yoktu.oracıkta ay ışığında durdum, ayın batmasını bekledim." Oyunu ilk kez sahneleyen David Leveaux'ya göre bu konuşma yalnız ölmek hakkındadır ve onun ölüm anını anlatıyordur. Bridgetı'ın ebeveynlerinden bütünüyle ayrılışının ve sürgününün bir parçasıdır. Levaaux Pinter'a oyunu açan uyurgezer kızın ölü olduğu sorduğunda Pinter "That would seem to be case. Iwant to put my cards on the table about one thing. There are many things i dont about the play but i have a strong feeling Bridget is dead." cevabını verir.Yine de bizi kararsız bırakan bridget ve oyun hakkında ikna etmeyen bir cevap. Moonlight'ı düşünürken Harold Pinter'ın "Art,Truth and Politics" isimli Nobel konuşmasından şu kesite rastladım. "There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false? Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But 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, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost. I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did." Bana kalırsa Moonlight tam da böyle bir oyundu.