The Theatre of Harold Pinter

Mark Taylor-Batty

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781408175323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

The plays of the late Nobel laureate Harold Pinter have formed part of the canon of world theatre since the 1960s. Frequently revived on the professional stage, and studied on almost every Theatre Studies course, his importance and influence is hard to overestimate. This Critical Companion offers an assessment of Pinter's entire body of work for the stage, appraising his skill as a dramatist and considering his impact and legacy. Through a clear focus on issues of theatricality and the effect of the plays in performance The Theatre of Harold Pinter considers Pinter's chief narrative concerns and offers a unifying theme through which over four decades of work may be understood. Plays are considered in themed chapters that follow the chronological sequence of work, illuminating the development of his aesthetic and concerns. The volume features too a series of essays from other leading scholars presenting different critical perspectives on the work, including Harry Burton on Pinter's early drama; Ann Hall on Revisiting Pinter's Women; Chris Megson on Pinter's Memory Plays of the 1970s, and Basil Chiasson on Neoliberalism and Democracy.

CHAPTER 1

INVASIONS AND OPPRESSIONS

Awkward Investments in Enclosed Spaces

The Room, The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter, The Hothouse

Engaging with any work of art, we first subconsciously gather information about the frame through which we might ‘read’ that art before digesting it. Opening a novel, for example, we might instantaneously recognise the indicators of genre that guide our appreciation and expectations of how the narrative will be told and how it might unfold. Once that frame has been recognised, the aesthetic experience falls easily into place. All cultural objects engage us in these ways, and many straightforwardly fulfil the expectations that have been ascribed to them culturally: a painted portrait tends to look like and even flatter its subject; a fairy story might playfully transgress ‘safe’ narrative subjects and end with a morally sound outcome; a romantic comedy film will end with the overcoming of some difficulty that has separated two people, and their happy union is celebrated in a communal scene. Part of our enjoyment of such cultural objects can often be precisely because they follow the ‘rules’ set for them, but we also enjoy the variations on a generic theme that the artists involved have constructed. Such traditional cultural discourses, however, might be considered to imply a stable, recognisable and even reliable world, and such an implication does not chime always with all artistic temperaments. What we call ‘realism’ in these contexts might not be altogether ‘realistic’: our world is not reliable, not always stable, and certainly not so predictable.

Theatrical discourses tend to declare themselves early. We begin to form a sense of our frame for appreciating the play from the poster that advertises it and get further information from any programme we buy and any arrangement of the stage as we enter the auditorium, if it is not concealed behind a curtain. That curtain itself reveals a certain set of traditions and expectations of course, and such a performance will begin with a ‘reveal’ that suggests a world deliberately and craft-fully separated from our own. Once a performance begins, we usually very quickly settle on an understanding of the discourses that are activated for us to ‘read’ what follows: realism or figurative playing and design, contemporary or historic setting, comedy or tragedy. When we have a sense of this semantic frame, we begin to enjoy first by investing in key characters: ‘meaning’ in the theatre is constructed through a chain of cumulative and inter-related emotional connections made across the divide between audience and characters. Traditional drama, throughout the centuries, has functioned by promoting audience investment in key characters, and using early scenes to establish those investments. Such investment is the chief point of contact between the play and its audience; it provides a context for understanding what is being presented, what is significant or trivial within the drama, and for creating expectations of how the difficulties that are established in the play might be resolved. Most traditional plays soon establish some conflict that is to be resolved, and we often invest in specific characters who might clarify the background to that conflict through expositionary dialogue. The investment is a quickly negotiated attachment that we make: ‘this person will explain the background here’, ‘this person is morally upstanding, I care what happens to her’. There might be a lead character who seems emotionally driven to take a specific course of action which involves great personal risk, and we invest our hope in them that the outcome will be a positive one, and our pity is invoked when things do not go their way. There might be a secondary ‘reasonable’ character who tries to persuade the first to take or avoid certain actions, and we invest in that character a hope they may be able to influence the first with their sensible advice, and therefore feel a frustration if that does not succeed.

In his early plays, and frequently throughout his playwriting career, Pinter seemed intent on re-writing this experience of investment, and manipulating the Aristotelian contract of cathartic reward via pity and fear in the process. If you invest hope that any one character in a Pinter play will clarify his or her objectives, or give you a clear understanding of their context or history, then your investment will be quickly frustrated. If you invest in a hope that a reason why conflict has arisen between two individuals will be clearly expressed in their dialogue, then that investment will be soon undermined. When one character begins to demand a clarification from another as to why they are behaving a certain way, you might desire that this character will succeed in bringing forth a straightforward response that will clarify which way the drama might proceed, but you will soon be disappointed. Pinter’s plays simply do not function in these ways, and were even constructed deliberately to frustrate those very usual expectations of how a piece of theatre might declare its frame for being read. In this way, the audience’s near-instinctive pursuit of ‘meaning’, of what a play is ‘about’, is immediately set out of kilter – the expected frame for ‘reading’ the material is deliberately incomplete. In effect, Pinter often provides the drama without a reliable key by which to read it. Recalling the first ever performance of a Pinter play, The Room, in May 1957, its director Henry Woolf described how, confronted with this deliberately dislocated frame ‘the audience woke up from its polite cultural stupor and burst into unexpected life, laughing, listening, taking part in the story unfolding onstage’.1 Pinter himself tangentially addressed the bewildering experience his plays might engender in a speech made to the National Student Drama Festival in 1962:

A character on the stage who can present no convincing argument or information as to his past experience, his present behaviour or his aspirations, nor give a comprehensive analysis of his motives is as legitimate and as worthy of attention as one who, alarmingly, can do all these things. The more acute the experience the less articulate its expression.2

The ‘alarmingly’ here is a satirical nod towards conventional stage realism, where such altogether unrealistic human behaviour is expected of traditional characters. The last sentence, though, is most telling as it hints at an artistic credo, one that recognises a complex relationship between human experience and the artistic expression, the communication of that experience.

When Pinter wrote The Room in early 1957, he was aware that he was writing for the actors and audience within a university arts faculty; the first (and then only) department of drama in the country at the University of Bristol. He may have felt that this context would have been tolerant of a more experimental mode of writing than he might then have conceived of providing for a more commercial context. He also knew he was writing a play to be delivered into the hands of a friend with whom he had shared a passion for certain modernist authors, and so someone who would be sympathetic to the ambition of the non-realist tone of the piece. This was a comfortable set of circumstances for a first attempt at writing drama; he was provided with a context within which his work would be rehearsed, conceived and performed and which had space for experiment and failure with no other consequences than, at worst, that he might simply regard the venture as work in progress. With The Room, he could expand into a dramatic space the ideas he had pursued in his youthful prose and poetry, most notably the metaphoric possibilities of a symbiosis between a person and the environment they inhabit and the consequent potency of invasion into that environment from outside. Kullus (written in 1949 and first published in 1968) is structured around the premise of one character assuming control of another’s room, and this concept was later expanded, adapted and developed in other works such as The Examination (1955, published 1959), The Compartment (unpublished, 1963) and The Basement (1967). The notion of one character entering a seemingly stable scenario and disturbing or upturning the familial or social arrangements he or she finds there is to become a staple element of what became described as the ‘pinteresque’ in critical reviews.

In The Room, Pinter takes the domestic chamber of the title and makes it a precarious location. He does this by taking two routes: one operating on his characters, as any playwright might, and another operating on his audience, which was altogether less usual in the 1950s. Whereas a dramatic tension is most often achieved by having the audience made aware of crucial details before the characters on stage discover them, Pinter constructed his first drama with his audience kept at an equal level of ignorance as his key protagonist, Rose, a woman of sixty. The play opens with her serving bacon and eggs to a silent man, Bert, in a basic bedsitting room. This room contains a bed, a stove, a rocking chair and a table and chairs. We note a humble household environment and assume a domestic relationship, a husband and wife. The relationship is presented in an almost stereotypical, comedic frame: a wife wittering away inanely around her husband, while he remains stoically silent, reading a simple magazine and eating his uncomplicated evening meal. We learn from Rose’s seemingly inconsequential chatter that Bert is planning to go out, that it is a bitter winter day outside and that she has a seemingly nosey concern for whoever has moved into the basement flat below. Bert’s silence and Rose’s nattering allow an audience to settle into what seems to be a domestic comedy or light drama, and we would tune our early investment into the character of Rose. That investment might be expected to develop into a sympathy and care for her, but also – given the comic potential of the housewife stereotype in mid-twentieth-century popular comedy genres – a possibility that she is being set up for an entertaining fall.

A knock at the door reveals Mr Kidd who, claiming to be checking on the pipes and asking after the furniture, comes across straightforwardly as the landlord of the building. Our usual tuning to theatrical discourse might cause us to expect him to offer something that would move the plot forward, indicate some crisis or demand upon Rose and Bert, but instead he comes and goes, providing only an opportunity for a comic dialogue that establishes his ownership of the house, but in terms that render the building in indefinable terms. He claims not to know how many floors it has, for example, and makes statements that subtly undermine Rose’s claim to the room as a stable site of home. He recalls the rocking chair, which she indicates she brought with her on moving in, but does not remember the armchair in which he sits, though Rose tells him it was there when she arrived. By telling us that the room used to be his bedroom, and stating he can ‘take his pick’ of any room now, he establishes for us a sense of the potentially temporary nature of Rose’s tenancy. Expecting information from a new character that will impel the play forward, the audience are left bemused and amused by the bumbling Mr Kidd, and Rose’s immediate response to her husband upon the landlord’s exit, ‘I don’t believe he had a sister, ever’,3 adds to a sense of him as an unreliable testimony in the play. This folds our investment back into Rose: it is she who must deliver for us a sense of where this play is heading, especially as she now sees her ever silent husband off out into the cold.

A husband who has said nothing and a landlord that brings no message, offers no dramatic dilemma or development; traditional male authority figures are presented as vacuous, seemingly without purpose in the early scenes of The Room, and this undermines any sense that the key female character is there simply to entertain us as a comic foil. The next scene begins to present her as a potential victim: two people looking for lodgings intimate that her room is to be let. Mr and Mrs Sands are disclosed standing in her doorway as Rose goes to it to take out her bin. She offers them warmth by her stove, and they come in and converse. They claim to be looking for the landlord but do not recognise the name of Kidd that Rose offers, and this partially unsettles the world on stage that has been established for us. Rose’s insistence that Mr Kidd is the landlord and the Sands’ brusque certainty that he is not might cause doubt in us about who is in charge in this world without a reliable authority figure, until the Sands inadvertently offer a sinister alternative in the form of someone who lives in the dark in the basement. Pinter protested once that ‘I wouldn’t know a symbol if I saw one’4 but it is difficult not to consider the mysterious figure, comfortably residing in an unlit, damp basement, as symbolically diabolical in some fashion, or as representing something repressed and unwelcome. Mrs Sands offers a lengthy speech on her and her husband’s encounter with the man in the cellar who had informed them that a room was vacant, and the room number given is indeed that of Rose’s humble abode. The threat of eviction is tied to this character below, and the dramatic tension that might drive the play is now established.

A couple of themes have become noticeable by this point, consolidated in niggling between the Sands; the repeated reference to parentage and the infantilisation of husbands by their wives suggest this play has some concern to displace or upset traditional male social roles. If the play establishes these disturbances in male presence, though, it is not to serve to address gender in any direct way, but perhaps does so to prepare the ground for the re-assertion of male authority that takes place in the play’s second half. No sooner that the Sands have left, Mr Kidd returns, now with a credible story, and a clarification for why he provided no information when first he appeared: he could not mention his given task while Rose’s husband was still present. All of a sudden, some of the play’s mysteries are being set straight and a sense of momentum consequently builds. The presence in the basement with whom the Sands had engaged is drawn more clearly by Mr Kidd, who explains that he has been waiting to let Rose know that the man downstairs wants to see her. He tells of how this man lies in the dark in the damp basement, just waiting for his audience with her. This implacable, insistent patience has all the qualities of a guilty secret, a skeleton in the cupboard, and Rose’s responses of denial affirm this, as she seemingly protests too much that she has no connection with the mystery figure, declaring ‘I don’t know him’ four times (104–5). She only finally concedes to meet the stranger when Mr Kidd suggests that if she does not do so immediately, the man might come up to confront her when her husband is at home. This reasoning, the need to keep whatever this man’s business with Rose is outside of her marriage, adds to the sense that she has some clear notion of who this man is or what he might represent, and that any intervention he might make could unsettle her contented, staid existence.

No sooner does she agree to meet the man, than we find him momentarily at her threshold. He is a blind black man, walking with the aid of a cane. His blindness puts paid to any of the abstract interpretations that might be applied to his penchant for staying in the dark (why would he need light?) but is also a clear signifier of his otherness, allied here to his ethnicity. His given name, Riley, both supports and troubles this otherness, as the name is ethnically Irish in origin. To be both black and Irish, while not improbable, was so unlikely in 1957 as to indicate to a London audience a deliberate clash of ethnicities, both of which, black and Irish, were subject to suspicion and hostility in certain social environments in the wake of the immigration surge on the back of the 1948 British Nationalities Act. Black characters (and indeed actors) on the British stage were relatively scarce in the late 1950s, so that Pinter’s decision here seems purposeful. When black characters were present on stage in new plays of the time, the social issues surrounding their ethnicity and treatment were to the fore.5 Even if we consider that determinism to have been nothing more than ‘othering’ Riley, the social signifier of a black character in relation to issues of tenancy (and, as we learn, familial or sexual relationship to a white woman) would have been so potent on the British stage in 1957 that its resonances cannot be ignored in appreciating the structure of this play, though these matters resonate differently on the stage today. What Pinter finally does, then, is not only clear up mysteries that might encourage allegorical readings of the play in performance, he injects a very clear stamp of social realism which, nonetheless, serves no clear ideological purpose other than to rush the real world rudely into this womb-like theatrical room on the back of a meaning-resistant metaphor. The play’s resolution is not straightforwardly understandable, or we are not encouraged to read it in social terms, but early audiences to the play would very quickly have experienced a shift in register, recognising social realism was being signalled, and that shift in register at the very least augments expectations to indicate that this scene is very serious in its implications. Riley makes demands upon Rose that suggest social or familial obligations. Speaking on behalf of (and, seemingly, as) Rose’s father, he implores her to ‘come home’ and addresses her as ‘Sal’ (108), implying a previous existence that Rose seeks to deny or resist. As a truncated form of Sally (which is itself an amicable form of the name Sarah), ‘Sal’ suggests a homely familiarity, but also an incompleteness. As with his own name, it fails to accord properly with its putative owner and this signals a crisis of identity that contributes to Rose’s instability. Where elsewhere on the British stage in the late 1950s, black characters addressed or signalled contemporary social tensions associated with their emigration from Caribbean islands to British mainland contexts, here Pinter inverts that theme of the trauma of re-location, and suggests that Rose should return home with Riley as her guide, that it is she who has sought exile, escape, opportunity, but that she holds responsibilities to the place and people she has left behind, represented hauntingly by the patriarchy, the father figure.

It is at this point that the play reaches it...

Table of contents

• In the same series from Bloomsbury Methuen Drama
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Invasions and Oppressions
• 2 The Company of Men and the Place of Women
• 3 Present Continuous, Past Perfect
• 4 The Impossible Family
• 5 Politics and the Artist as Citizen
• 6 Some Concluding Remarks
• 7 Critical and Performance Perspectives
• Chronology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Copyright