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Pinter Goes Political
| Article
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16253 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1989 |
2,442 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
If a playwright becomes very, very successful among "serious" people, there comes a point when his work acquires the status described by Tom Wolfe in connection with some types of modern art. That is to say that the explanation becomes as important, if not more important, than the work itself. The plays of Harold Pinter are like this now. It may be that they were always like this. With the exception of a few avant-garde aficionados, the British did not like the plays very much in the fifties when producers began to stage them in London; audiences and critics were often baffled and hostile because--unlike other new playwrights of the time--Pinter seemed to have no emotional or political ax to grind. Those who did like the plays spoke of a "pervading sense of menace" and other vague qualities.
Arbitrary Contempt
There was never anything very mysterious about Pinter's work. He drew short-term theatrical effects out of characters who liked to browbeat or show arbitrary contempt for each other, rather as chimpanzees or apes behave in establishing dominance among a group. Since theater is primarily an emotional ritual depending on short-term effects, this was not a disadvantage. In time the intellectual emptiness of Pinter's work became a positive quality, because it left a sort of vacuum that could be filled by critical and academic speculation and (much more important) chic dinner-table conversation.
This was a great gift to audiences who like to carry a play out of the theater with them. Even Noel Coward acquired a taste for Pinter. He said:
He is at least a genuine original. I don't think he could
write in any other way if he tried. The Caretaker, on the
face of it, is everything I hate most in the theater,
squalor, repletion, lack of action, but somehow it seized
hold of you … Nothing happiness except that somehow it
does. The writing is at moments brilliant and quite
unlike anyone else's.
This real originality was by no means as puzzling as Coward supposed. It is not true that nothing happens in Pinter's plays. The characters are put into various sorts of danger that excite and exploit vicarious feelings of outrage and
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