That output was celebrated in July during an ambitious festival of Pinter’s work, presented by the Lincoln Center Festival 2001 and featuring productions imported from Dublin’s Gate Theatre and London’s Almeida and Royal Court Theatres. (Concurrent with these productions was a tribute to Pinter the screenwriter, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center.) Pinter has written twenty-nine plays; the nine presented in New York were enough to remind you of the idiosyncrasies of the playwright’s style and, indeed, the almost obsessive narrowness of his themes. All of Pinter’s work is, in some way or another, about violence—whether expressed in the corrosive interactions among family members (The Homecoming), the hurtful and confusing silences between couples (The Room, Landscape, Ashes to Ashes, Betrayal, many others), or in repressive and cruel actions on the part of the State against individuals (The Birthday Party, One for the Road, Mountain Language, Party Time). Over the years, Pinter has won a dedicated audience who have found a curious comfort in his bleak dramatizations of the ways in which our unwillingness or inability to make connections, to communicate meaningfully (here you think of those famous Pinteresque silences and pauses), lead to disasters both private and public.
And yet because it allowed you to absorb a good amount of Pinter in a short amount of time, the festival also reminded you that Pinter has remained within the same narrow artistic topography for much of his career; with one splendid exception (the American première of his latest play), the nine plays presented suggested a playwright who has stuck with the same thematic and stylistic formulae that first made him famous, reusing them in play after play with, it now seems, diminishing intensity of inspiration. The once-stimulating idiosyncrasies—the silences, the pauses, the hesitations—have in too many cases devolved into tics; worse, the showily “disturbing” exteriors of these works too often failed to hide the fact that the plays seem less and less to illuminate, in any profound way, the dark forces that have always interested Pinter. Indeed, the festival suggested that The Comfort of Strangers may be emblematic of the playwright’s work in more ways than one. For it revealed a playwright who is implicated, one might say, in the aggression and unreason he wants to indict; an author who, like so many of his villains—like Robert—is more interested in making you feel pain than in explaining what the pain might mean.
The festival began with a double bill of two short works, A Kind of Alaska (1982) and One for the Road (1984). This was a canny pairing, for these plays represent not only Pinter’s two basic theatrical modes of expression—small people engaged in quiet, futile conversations that go nowhere, and loud, angry men doing cruel things to helpless victims—but his two main, interrelated themes: the failure of language in its proper role as a vehicle for human connection, and the violent abuse of power.
A Kind of Alaska, which received a starkly effective production, is based (like the 1990 Robin Williams film Awakenings) on Oliver Sacks’s book Awakenings, which first appeared in 1973. Pinter’s play is about a woman, excellently played by Penelope Wilton with just the right mix of anxious humor and desperate pathos, who awakens from a twenty-nine-year-long coma; as she gradually, incredulously realizes what’s happened, she tries to reconcile what’s inside her mind—a bright, terrified sixteen-year-old girl—and what the world around her has become. “Do you know me?” she asks; and then: “Are you speaking?”; “I sound…out of tune”; “I’ve been nowhere.” The lines suggest the extent to which Sacks’s story is an ideal vehicle for Pinter’s obsession with linguistic and emotional alienation, an obsession that also shapes The Homecoming, Landscape, Monologue, and The Room.
The other play in the opening double bill was One for the Road, a product of the playwright’s later, overtly “political” period, which began about twenty years ago, at the onset of the Reagan-Thatcher era. First published in The New York Review of Books in 1984, this twenty-minute-long mini-drama is a brief visit with a sadistic, if exaggeratedly civil, torturer in some nameless police state. A man called Victor, wanted for some reason by the State, is brought before the well-dressed, benevolent-seeming Nicolas (played with great relish, in the Lincoln Center Festival performances, by Pinter himself); there follows some chitchat that suggests why Pinter found in McEwan’s sinister Robert a kindred spirit. (Like Robert, Nicolas oscillates between arch politesse and sinister inappropriateness: “You’re a civilized man and so am I,” he tells the terrified Victor, and then goes on to talk about his penis.) Victor is then dragged offstage, where something terrible is done to his tongue, as is made clear when he reappears onstage, unable to speak clearly. Then his wife appears, and she’s interrogated, too, only to be taken off to be used as a sex toy by the police; then their child, Nicky, comes on, is asked a few questions, and he’s taken off, too, to be killed. That’s pretty much it. One for the Road prepared audiences for the brutalities of Pinter’s angry political works, a group that includes Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes, which were also performed during the festival.
A perhaps unintended consequence of presenting A Kind of Alaska and One for the Road together was that audiences could see the extent to which these works are suggestive rather than fully discursive—moody sketches for plays, which provoke unpleasant feelings without being rigorously thought-provoking. This almost semaphoric quality should not come as a surprise. From the start, as he himself has said many times, Pinter has been a playwright who finds inspiration for his dramas in striking or disturbing images he’s noticed: in the case of The Room, for instance, it was a glimpse, during a party he’d been attending, of a dithering man (it turned out to be Quentin Crisp) talking nonstop as he served eggs to an unresponsive oaf; in that of The Caretaker, it was a couple of threatening-looking men he saw in a building he once lived in. As the playwright likes to explain it, these images start him writing; quite often, he acknowledges, he himself doesn’t know in advance where an image will lead him. The “formal construction,” he told Mireia Aragay and Ramon Simó at the University of Barcelona during a 1996 interview, “is in the course of the work on the play.”
Pinter has, indeed, always liked to characterize himself as an “intuitive” writer, and he enjoys expressing a kind of bemusement about what he does and, sometimes, a downright incomprehension about how he does it. In a 1957 letter to his former English teacher, Joseph Brearly, a portion of which was reprinted in the Stagebill program for the festival, he wrote, “I have written three plays this year. I don’t quite know how, or why, but I have.” And again, in April 1958, in a letter to Peter Wood, who would be directing The Birthday Party: “The thing germinated and bred itself. It proceeded according to its own logic. What did I do? I followed the indications, I kept a sharp eye on the clues I found myself dropping.” This emphasis on an odd kind of passivity in the face of his inspiration is something you’d be tempted to write off as youthful diffidence, or pretentiousness, were it not for the fact that Pinter continues today to work in much the same way, and indeed likes to emphasize that he begins with the concrete image and then waits to see what comes next. “I’ve never written from an abstract idea at all,” he told his Spanish interviewers.
The lack of ideological foundations, the want of a comforting, overarching theory or abstraction to organize the concrete images and words you see and hear onstage, is what lies behind the menacing emptiness you feel in Pinter’s plays. At the beginning of his career, the absence of explanations of the conventional variety (psychology, plot) for the unsettling actions and tableaux that Pinter liked to stage was striking, and original. It seemed to be the point. In quasi-political plays like The Birthday Party and in domestic dramas (for lack of a better word) like The Room and The Homecoming, the hermetic quality of the works, the disorienting lack of obvious connection between the concreteness of his surfaces—the action, the dialogue—and any kind of subtext; the plays’ famous refusal, or apparent refusal, to be “political”: all this, while angering some critics, seemed to others, and certainly to audiences, an apt theatrical analog for many of the
anxieties of the postwar world. (It was political, but just not in the obvious way.) The existential dread and moral emptiness that were the by-products of the Cold War at its height, the debasement of serious political discourse by cynical and self-congratulatory democracies that acted tyrannically, the fragility and tentativeness of meaningful human communication—all these seemed to be what Pinter’s work was somehow “about,” even if the playwright himself avoided claims to any kind of organizing theory or ideology. In this, he was very much in the tradition of post-Beckettian drama. (Pinter has often and rightly acknowledged his debt to Beckett, and there are indeed many similarities, with one crucial exception: you feel that Beckett likes the human race, whereas Pinter doesn’t.)
Yet the selection of works presented during the Lincoln Center Festival suggested that, however original the writer’s tone, theatrical gestures, and modes of presentation once were, there’s been surprisingly little sign of significant artistic growth or experimentation since those stunningly disorienting early works. (The inclusion of Pinter’s adultery drama, Betrayal [1978], in more than just its film version, would have helped to dispel this impression, perhaps; it’s one of the rare works from what you could call the second half of his creative life that’s about emotions more complex than either abjection or rage.) An early work like The Room can still unsettle you, as it did in a taut production at Lincoln Center featuring the superb Lindsay Duncan as the harried, desperate, disoriented Rose (in, as it were, the Quentin Crisp role), whose endless chatter is meant less to be heard than to insulate herself from the terrifying reality of the world around her. But its epigones now seem, at best, exercises in mood rather than meaning (even when it’s the meaning of no meaning). This was true of Monologue, that one-sided dialogue between a lonely man and an absent friend with whom he may or may not have quarreled over a woman, which, at Lincoln Center, was unfocused and without urgency, as if merely to have staged it was enough; and true, too, of Landscape, which in its Lincoln Center incarnation was almost embarrassingly mannered, with its fussily choreographed exchanges and precious, Masterpiece Theatre enunciation of the fruitless dialogue between its dreamy female lead and her clunky, earthbound husband—that recurrent Pinteresque duo. He talks about beer while she rhapsodizes about love.
And it was certainly true of Ashes to Ashes, which yet again pairs a dreamily nostalgic woman and a hard-nosed man in a fruitless dialogue. But this time, the woman’s erotic reveries, out of which the man keeps trying to rouse her, are about a man much like Nicolas in One for the Road: he’s a figure of some kind of sinister authority who sexually humiliated her—“Kiss my fist,” she recalls him ordering her—and was, it turns out, responsible for the death of her baby. This makes for some creepy moments. But while the sinister surface hints at a connection between eros and violence and oppression, it’s hard to cash out just what it is that connects them, or what that might mean, because there’s nothing really there apart from the sinister surface. (In Pinter’s works about torture and totalitarianism you find yourself wishing for the moral subtlety and emotional complexity of Jacobo Timerman.) Ironically, it may be that the superficiality and unpersuasiveness of this and so much else of what was presented at Lincoln Center have to do with the fact that the times have caught up with Pinter. The silences, pauses, hesitations, disorientations, the subtle indictments of talk without signification and action without effect, of the inadequacy of traditional personal and political narratives, which once seemed groundbreaking and new, have been so internalized by postmodern, post-political culture that many of the plays seem almost like period pieces. These extremely reverent productions only emphasized that impression; if anything, the productions seemed to outweigh the plays themselves.
It would be hard to think of a better symbol for the way in which Pinter’s work has devolved into showy displays of “Pinteresque” style than the Lincoln Center performances of The Homecoming. As it happened, the 1973 film version of this work, which reunited some of the stars of the original 1964 stage production, was shown during the festival, and hence offered a record, however imperfect, of the play as originally presented—and, to some degree, experienced.
The Homecoming, a work that is generally considered the cornerstone of the playwright’s oeuvre and may well be his masterpiece, is a gruesome domestic tragicomedy about a man and his sons, a kind of scarily bipolar Death of a Salesman. Set in an old house in North London, the play follows the acidic interactions between an elderly man named Max (Ian Holm, who played the role of the son Lenny in the original production) and his three grown sons: the seedy underworld entrepreneur Lenny (Ian Hart), the dumb would-be boxer Joey, and the refined Teddy, who’s left home for the States years before to become a philosophy professor, and who’s now returning with his wife, Ruth, for a visit. As Max interacts with his three “boys” (each of whom can be thought of as representing a different component of the human character: intellect, cunning, brute strength), strange tensions, buried hurts, and a characteristically Pinteresque blend of eros and violence become discernible. By the end of the play, Ruth has engaged in erotic play with all three brothers, and decides to stay on in London, partly as a kind of den mother to these men, partly as a prostitute working for Lenny in order to pay her way.
Of all of Pinter’s plays, The Homecoming is the most successful in its attempt to fashion a dramatic world in which people say and do everyday things—talk about the past, fix meals, drink glasses of water—and yet, because of the hidden internal logic, the result is anything but everyday. (Critics like to point to Pinter’s influence on young contemporary playwrights; Michael Billington, partaking in The New York Times’s lavish and adulatory coverage of the festival, listed Joe Orton, David Mamet, Neil LaBute, Sarah Kane, and Patrick Marber as the inheritors of the older playwright’s “enduring legacy.” But I often wonder whether Pinter’s real heir isn’t the British filmmaker Peter Greenaway, whose work is also distinguished by the sense it gives you of a hermetic world whose coherences you must trust in, even if you’re not sure what they mean.) In order for the piece to have its proper impact, to produce that characteristic tension between quotidian surfaces and submerged menace, the surfaces have to be persuasively quotidian. Few other playwrights have been so intent on, or successful at, conveying the feel and rhythms of everyday talk and movements, however bizarre or unexpected the eventual result of those words and actions may be.
The film of The Homecoming, photographed in drab browns and grays, looks wilted and ordinary, which is just right. (It must be said that the print shown at the Film Society retrospective was embarrassingly inadequate: pitted, pocked, striated to the point of being nearly unwatchable, with a distracting wobbly green vertical line that refused to budge. If Lincoln Center wants to pay homage to cinematic artists, a good start would be to obtain decent prints of their work.) More important, the performances were perfect: the young Ian Holm’s Lenny had just the right combination of menacing braggadocio and an underlying weakness, and Vivien Merchant (the first Mrs. Pinter) is brilliant as Ruth, the plainness and openness of her broad face making all the more terrifying, somehow, her character’s apparent transformation from a self-effacing, carefully well-mannered housewife into a controlling, sexually manipulative siren.
The Lincoln Center Homecoming couldn’t have been more different from the film. Fussily directed—choreographed would be a better word—by the Gate Theatre’s Robin Lefevre, the action was balletic, artificial, mannered. Ian Holm’s Max was excellent; he felt lived-in and shrunken and yet, somehow, still powerful. But the three sons were all, in their way, too attractive, too actor-y. Worst of all was the Ruth of Lia Williams, a model-thin, high-cheekboned blonde with a breathy, Marilyn Monroe voice and creamy pastel suits that made her look like a vintage 1960s Barbie—or, perhaps, a first-class stewardess in a 1960s airline ad. Her whippet-like elegance, the anomalous smartness of her costumes, the high stylization of her delivery all warped the play’s crucial dynamics. From the minute Ms. William
s entered, smirkingly confident of her allure, there was no doubt in your mind that she’d take control of these angry, inarticulate men. Because there was no doubt, the play lost its tightly wound tension and, ultimately, its point.
So the festival suggested, if anything, the extent to which one strand of Pinter’s output—those self-contained works in which any obvious meaning is submerged under the lapidary surfaces and the potent moods and effects they create—have degenerated into increasingly empty exercises in style. As for the works in which there was, unmistakably, “meaning”—One for the Road and its spiritual successor, Mountain Language (1988), which received a noisy, unfocused production—the substance is obvious (police states are bad), and the presentation of it coarse, obtuse, undigested.
The political plays are meant to be indictments of totalitarian repression, of the way that power corrupts, of the fact that, as the playwright said apropos of Party Time, “there are extremely powerful people in apartments in capital cities in all countries who are actually controlling events that are happening on the street in a number of very subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways.” And so, in these works, the playwright depicts torturers manipulating their subjects, or soldiers abusing innocent old women. It is here, in his attempt to engage in substantive political discourse, that the famous flatness of Pinter’s surfaces, their odd texturelessness, his tendency to depict rather than to explicate, become a serious liability. It’s often hard to sense anything beneath the surface of these works but the author’s righteous ire.
How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken Page 44