STAGE

There’s one thing British playwright Harold Pinter can’t stand: actors overdoing his trademark “Pinter pauses”--the ones where the actors say nothing for several seconds at a time. Pinter told the Times of London that he regrets having written the word pause in the scripts. “All I was talking about was a natural break, when people don’t know quite what to do next,” he said. “Those silences have achieved such significance (pause) that they have overwhelmed the bloody plays.”