Pinter’s Latest Miniature

Harold Pinter is 75, and not in good health, his esophagus ravaged by cancer and his famous voice “notably weakened.” But somehow, the playwright has willed himself to create a short but profound new radio play, which will receive its premiere next week on BBC Radio. “For Voices, Pinter has reworked five of his later plays – One for the Road, Mountain Language, The New World Order, Party Time and Ashes to Ashes – into a fragmented narrative on cruelty, torture and oppression, which is interrupted, accompanied and complemented by [composer James] Clarke’s mercurial score, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the soprano Eileen Aargaard and an Azeri singer, Fatma Mehralieva, among others.”