A Pinter Actor Must Know His Between-the-Lines
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
Published: October 16, 2005
"Pause."
"Silence."
"Slight pause."
"Long silence."
As difficult as it can sometimes be for audiences to parse the meanings
in the pregnant pauses of Harold Pinter, the British playwright who won
the Nobel Prize in Literature last week, imagine the challenges faced by
the actors who are asked to impregnate them.
Perhaps more than any plays of the 20th century, Mr. Pinter's require
actors to reassess the relationships between performer and text, between
language and meaning. Mr. Pinter even demands that his interpreters
analyze the relative weights and measures of different kinds of
speechlessness. In a play by Mr. Pinter, a silence is never a mere
pause, and a pause is never to be confused with a silence. Each has
its own presence and purpose, and it is the actor's job to unlock and
communicate to the audience the secrets of the empty spaces in the text.
But actors can't approach Mr. Pinter's plays by trying to establish
psychological motive through straightforward interpretation of text
and stage directions. The dialogue in most plays concerns itself with
human beings' attempts (futile or otherwise) to communicate something,
which clarifies the role of the actor in the process. Establish what is
meant to be communicated - whether or not the character is articulating
it comprehensibly or successfully - and you're at least on the right track.
Much of the conversation in Mr. Pinter's plays, by contrast, is an attempt
to mask feeling or motive, to avoid communication or connection. And often
characters are themselves blind to the impulses that move them. The elusive
motivations of Ruth, the docile but sexually enthralling wife in
Mr. Pinter's early success, "The Homecoming," first played by Mr. Pinter's
first wife, Vivien Merchant, defy any neat psychological explanations.
In a 1966 interview published in The Paris Review, Mr. Pinter was asked
what made the talk in his plays so theatrically effective. "I think possibly
it's because people fall back on anything they can lay their hands on
verbally to keep away from the danger of knowing, and of being known,"
was his reply. The actor's instinct to reveal can be at odds with the
characters' impulse to conceal, even as they chatter on at length, keeping
awareness or self-exposure at bay.
But if Mr. Pinter's plays are fraught with acting booby traps, they also
contain immeasurable rewards for those able to negotiate the terrain.
Mr. Pinter himself trained as an actor and has performed in his plays
and those of other playwrights throughout his career (health permitting,
he's expected to appear in a Royal Court Theater production of Samuel
Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape" next year). His oblique writing style is
a testament to the trust he places in his actors to create tension,
atmosphere and excitement from the hilariously mundane or elliptical
and obscure streams of words at their disposal. The famous pauses -
almost invariably presented without any description of their emotional
tenor - pay homage to the ability of actors to instill them with power,
to communicate with silence.
This is why a badly acted Pinter play can be more painful to endure than
a badly acted Shakespeare play. With Shakespeare, we're left with the
beautiful poetry and the satisfactions of narrative, but with Mr. Pinter
we're left with long, empty exchanges about, say, a cheese roll, and lots
of dead air.
Which isn't to say that the language in Mr. Pinter's plays is meaningless
camouflage. It is more meticulously wrought and precisely measured than
his silences are, and it requires actors of immense skill and sure training
to imbue it with the proper musical coloring: the Cockney music-hall jazz
of early plays like "The Birthday Party" and "The Caretaker" or the elegant,
oracular chamber music of later ones like "Old Times."
Sometimes actors successful at one mode cannot manage the other. It was a
surprise to me to find that Eileen Atkins, one of the most intelligent and
technically accomplished actresses onstage today, was far out of her element
as the chattering landlady in the recent London revival of "The Birthday
Party." Even John Gielgud, who triumphed alongside an equally formidable
acting name, Ralph Richardson, in Mr. Pinter's "No Man's Land," struggled
to find his way into the contradictions of the character he played,
according to the diaries of the production's director, Peter Hall. "He's
over-experimenting," Mr. Hall wrote, "playing it humble, playing it
conceited, playing it creepy, playing it simple. It is a search for the
simple key. Whereas the truth is that Spooner is many things and changes
his posture from second to second. So there isn't a simple key."
The performers most at ease in Mr. Pinter's plays are those who freely
abandon the search for a simple key and are serenely at ease with the
elusive meanings in the writing, who can inhabit the abstract or seedily
specific worlds he conjures without any sense of artifice. In recent years
the most confident voyager in Mr. Pinter's distinctive theatrical landscapes
has probably been the British actress Lindsay Duncan, who appeared in
Mr. Pinter's own production of the plays "Celebration" and "The Room" at
the Lincoln Center Festival in 2001.
Ms. Duncan even more unforgettably starred in the New York premiere of
"Ashes to Ashes" in 1999. Playing an enigmatic figure consumed by
memories - or fantasies - of sexual abasement and of larger horrors
echoing the Holocaust, she brought an emotional dimension to the play
that went well beyond what was on the page, turning it into a shattering
commentary on the continuity and contagion of abuse in human experience.
As with so many other actors who have triumphed in Mr. Pinter's work -
himself included - Ms. Duncan justifies the trust he continually places
in actors by giving them such a significant role in illuminating the
mysteries of human behavior that concern him. His respect for the actor
can ultimately be seen as a correlative of one of his greatest moral
concerns, his compassion for the suffering individual and outrage at
the violence done to him.
Most of Mr. Pinter's plays depict some form of violence - emotional,
physical, sexual or psychological - that human beings visit upon one
another. In choosing to write for the stage, Mr. Pinter suggests that
for him the truth of these acts, whether they're performed in unnamed
totalitarian states or in crabbed London flats, can best be exposed by
other human beings, by actors on a stage: for inhumanity to be understood,
it can't be described merely in words but must be made literally human.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/weekinreview/16isher.html
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