An Appraisal
A Creator of Theater That Seizes the Senses
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: October 13, 2005
Great theater, the kind that changes the way you see and hear the world,
acts like a benign virus. It creeps into the bloodstream, without your really
knowing it, while you are watching a performance. Then it grows, it mutates,
it seizes the senses. And often it won't leave you for hours, even days,
after the curtain has come down.
Harold Pinter is the greatest living practitioner of viral theater. If a
production of his "Homecoming," "Birthday Party" or "Betrayal" is even
passably acted, you leave the theater with an overwhelming suspicion of
everything andeveryone around you. That includes yourself.
To attempt conversation in the immediate aftermath of a Pinter play is not,
you discover, a good idea. You find yourself crippled by an odd feeling
that Mr. Pinter has written not only your dialogue but also that of the
people you are talking to. "Why did he say that?" you think. And then
again: "Why did I say that?" A crippling self-consciousness stretches
the silences between sentences, and some ineffable metronome seems to
be dictating the rhythms of speech.
Mr. Pinter is rightly seen as the true heir of a man who was his friend and
mentor, the Irish dramatist Samuel Beckett. Like Beckett, Mr. Pinter
creates worlds at once profoundly comic and tragic in which meaning is
never fixed, memory lies and people are inevitably betrayed not just by
one another but also by their own minds. But while Beckett set most of
his plays in cosmic realms of sterility and devastation - the "Lear"-like
blasted heath of "Waiting for Godot," the imprisoning hillock of "Happy
Days" - Mr. Pinter firmly places cosmic anxiety in the everyday world of
social interaction.
When his first full-length-play, "The Birthday Party," in which a man in a
seaside boarding house is abducted by two strangers, opened in London in
1958, absurdity took a disquieting leap from the metaphoric to the concrete.
No one, it seemed, was safe, at any time or in any place. Harold Hobson,
the venerable critic for The Sunday Times of London and one of Pinter's
earliest champions, wrote of the production: "Though you go to the uttermost
parts of the earth, and hide yourself in the most obscure lodgings in the
least popular of towns, one day there is a possiblity that two men will
appear. They will be looking for you, you cannot get away. And someone
will be looking for them too. There is terror everywhere."
And so it has remained in Pinterland, a territory that has since been built
upon to remarkably varied effect by playwrights as terse as David Mamet and
as rhapsodic as Michael Frayn. Granted, Mr. Pinter's settings have moved up
the social ladder over the years, from the shabby working-class environs of
"The Caretaker" and "The Homecoming" to the comfortably upholstered rooms
of "Old Times," "Betrayal" and "No Man's Land." To see a double bill of his
earliest and most recent plays is to realize both the distance Mr. Pinter
has traveled and the astonishing consistency of his voice.
"The Room" (1957), is set in a decrepit boarding house; "Celebration" (1999),
in a swanky West End restaurant that bears a precise resemblance to the Ivy,
a fabled watering hole in the London theater district. (First presented
together in New York at the Lincoln Center Festival in 2001, the plays are
being revived in December by the Atlantic Theater Company.) But no matter
how fancy or threadbare his characters' trappings, they find themselves in
what is in essence the same place: a single room that becomes increasingly
claustrophobic, even with only two people in it. And the dynamic that keeps
the conversation flowing and ceasing and circumnavigating, like water through
a clogged drain, is also the same. It is all about, in a word, power.
For what creates the extraordinary tension in Mr. Pinter's work is something
more than the ambiguity that resonates so loudly in those famous pauses of
his. Just as potent is the see-sawing of control among the play's characters,
whether they be husbands and wives, fathers and sons or presumably criminal
louts. Mr. Pinter may write plays about what he once called "the weasel
under the cocktail cabinet." But within the climate of unspecified menace,
men and women do their best to dominate the unknowable by dominating their
fellow humans.
This shifting dialectic of oppressors and oppressed is what makes all Pinter
plays, in a sense, political and tallies with his public role as a voluble
critic of international repression, censorship and wars (like the invasion
of Iraq) he perceives as unjust. Later Pinter works like "One for the Road"
(1984), which takes place in an interrogation room in an unspecificed
totalitarian country, channel this point of view in atypically
literal-minded ways.
But unlike other contemporary British playwrights like David Hare, Howard
Brenton and David Edgar, Mr. Pinter is usually less overtly topical and
rarely prone to dividing his dramatis personae into the good and the bad.
Everyone in Mr. Pinter's world is taking part in the same Darwinian struggle.
The more self-aware his characters become, like the upper-middle-class
culturati of "Old Times" and "Betrayal," the stronger their sense of guilt.
This does not mean they behave any better. In his short drama, "Ashes to
Ashes" (1996), Mr. Pinter hints at direct parallels between political
torture, hazily remembered by a radiantly frightened woman in an
expensively appointed sitting room, and her relationship with her
husband. The fascist, it appears, lurks just beneath everyone's skin -
though women, eternal sphinxes in Mr. Pinter's portrayal, have at least
marginally the moral upper hand.
While entire academic journals and newsletters, not to mention countless
doctoral theses the world over, are devoted to dissecting themes and
allegorical intent in Mr. Pinter's work, it is his form that makes him one
of the most essential artists produced by the 20th century. Guilt,
displacement, aggression, bafflement and a restless, ravening fear -
these are all conveyed by the shape and structure of not only the plays
themselves but also the sentences and silences within them.
Quoting from a Pinter play out of context never captures this process. The
power of his dialogue is in the accumulation of often simple words and
phrases that seem to change color and form as they are repeated.
That is why Mr. Pinter's work gets under our skins more than that of any
living playwright. His insistent, stealthy style makes us think as he
thinks. Which in turn forces us, in the cloudy afterglow of a performance
of one of his plays, to question everything about our simplest social
interactions. At his best, Mr. Pinter opens doors of perception onto
a corridor that never ends.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/13/books/13cnd-pinter.html
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