Pinter's last pause

SPEAKING VOLUMES

On the Harold Pinter Archive blog, Kate O’Brien has a wonderful post on the reader’s reports about Pinter’s plays, written for the benefit of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office.

These anonymous souls were blunt in their criticism: The Birthday Party was “an insane pointless play”, The Room was “another dreary mess of symbolism”, The Caretaker was “a piece of incoherence in the manner of Beckett”. This was in keeping with the public reaction to Pinter’s first and second plays, The Room and The Birthday Party. The critic Harold Hobson disagreed strongly, suggesting that the world should make a note of Pinter’s name.

Over the next five decades, the world did. Pinter, who died on Christmas Eve of the oesophageal cancer diagnosed in 2001, was the much-feted author of 29 plays, 26 screenplays, assorted poems and other works, and had made a name for himself as a playwright, an actor, an activist and a gadfly.

When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, he devoted most of his speech to a trenchant attack on Messieurs Bush and Blair: “…[The] majority of politicians…. are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.”

This was what he set out to dismantle as a playwright, right from the start. Like Beckett, Brecht and Ionesco, Pinter had an acute ear for the hollowness of language, the ways in which ordinary, everyday conversations could mask the undercurrents of violence, injustice and betrayal. The plays of his early and middle period—the ones most critics would account his best work—introduced a current of menace into situations that seemed, at first sight, commonplace.

In Kafka’s Soup, a collection of literary parodies, Michael Crick takes on Pinter in a clever little scene where two men, one with a “tramp-like appearance”, share cheese on toast—except that the recipe is a fancy one for mozzarella on ciabatta. It’s a well-turned parody; but halfway through, the Pinteresque pauses that Crick introduces in homage and the apparently aimless dialogue take on a life of their own. By the time Crick ends, he’s succeeded in writing something that goes beyond parody—it’s like the first scene of a Pinter play where you’re left waiting for the situation to escalate into classic Pinter territory. Beckett was a relatively easy target for parody, as was Brecht; Pinter’s talent was proof against the easy spoof.

At the Edinburgh Festival in September 2006, Pinter made his first public appearance after several years of battling his throat cancer. The tent in Charlotte Square Gardens was packed to capacity, and those of us who’d managed to squeeze in were slightly disconcerted at the fact that Pinter stared back at the audience with the same avid curiosity with which we were staring at him. He read from The Birthday Party, slammed the Iraq war in no uncertain terms, and shared a poem with the audience:

“I’m going to quote you a four-line poem I wrote. Only four lines. When we invaded Iraq. Called—this is the important thing—called ‘Democracy’. There’s no escape / The big pricks are out / They’ll fuck everything in sight / Watch your back.”

He sat back and watched us with amusement, as the audience passed from bewilderment to applause and laughter. I thought of what his fellow writer, David Hare had said about him: “In sum, this tribute from one writer to another: you never know what the hell’s coming next.”

Plays have a peculiar life cycle; unlike film, or the novel, drama seems far more bound to its time, and even the best plays go into hibernation for a while before coming back as classics of the theatre. Already, Pinter’s plays are not performed as often as they once were; many more people read them than watch them on stage. But his plays were only part of Harold Pinter’s legacy; his acute understanding of language, its nuances, its possibilities, is what he left for the benefit of other writers.

“Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time,” he said in his Nobel speech. More than any other writer of his time, he knew how to skate across that unstable surface, and reach the other shore.

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