Words have become so debased or featureless in theatre discussion that when a critic calls a play "interesting," one assumes that he must have been bored by it. I must therefore assert that when I say I found the double bill of one-act plays by Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett at the Cherry Lane interesting, I want my readers to understand that I mean that these plays merit their attentive consideration ...

Beckett's Play is less "fun" but a further instance of his genius. The stage directions as Beckett himself sets them down furnish a clue to his style: "Extreme front, touching one another, three large white urns, one yard high, from which three heads protrude through holes close fitting to their necks ... They face undeviatingly front throughout. Age: indifferent. Appearance: indifferent ... Faces impassive throughout. Voices toneless except where expression indicated."

Whom do these "heads" speaking from their (funerary?) urns, belong to? Woman 1, Woman 2, Man. The play is the essentialized comic-tragedy (or meta-drama) of adultery: the eternal triangle. The dialogue is uninflected by any readily defined emotion or climax. At times each of the figures speaks some incomplete phrase typical of his or her thought. Often they speak simultaneously -- not always intelligibly -- and in a semi-murmur affecting us like the rustling of leaves or the whisperings of the dead.

The triangular situation begins hilariously as a vulgar commonplace. Slowly a sense of boredom, then of guilt, then of regret, then of hopeless indifference and finally of utter forgetfulness steals over the three livid figures immersed in their urns as if in a gray sod, nearly mute and altogether meaningless. It is almost too awful to be sad, too disheartening to be tragic.

You have heard of the Constitution being written on a postage stamp or of the Lord's prayer being engraved on a pin. Beckett's Play is like a statement of the polygamous sex-agony inscribed in sure shorthand strokes. This leaves me dissatisfied, dumbfounded. But who says Beckett hoped to satisfy me? There is acute pathos here, but so compressed that one is not permitted a sigh or the shedding of a tear.

Scientists have said that there will come a time when a small pill will replace a full meal. The pill takes less time to consume and will furnish us with all the needed vitamins. Perhaps so. It will indicate progress and certainly to be "modern." Unregenerate hedonist that I am, I shall always prefer a banquet even though it may make me sick. Still, Beckett is a master. As director, Alan Schneider is his obedient servant.

Harold Clurman, The Nation, vol. exeviii, January 27, 1964, 106-107.