A Room of His Own

A critic, fresh from Lincoln Center’s Harold Pinter Festival, investigates the forbidding territory beyond Pinter 101

By Roger Copeland

TWO people in a room—I am dealing a great deal of the time with this image of two people in a room. The curtain goes up on the stage, and I see it as a very potent question: What is going to happen to these two people in the room? Is someone going to open the door and come in?
—Harold Pinter

The essential ingredients rarely change: A room, a safe enclosed space of some sort. Characters who feel not only secure, but “at home” in that space. An unexpected visitor whose very presence evokes a sense of dread, of inexplicable threat—a fear that seems at first, unfounded, even paranoid. Then…almost imperceptibly, an “invasion” begins; and the boundaries between inside/outside, familiar/unfamiliar, safe/unsafe, self/other begin to blur.

Eventually, territory changes hands and roles are reversed. The battlefield may be domestic, but the tactical maneuvers are as complicated as any military scenario ever studied at West Point. And no matter how violent or unsettling the outcome, language—and its necessary complement, silence—remains the principal weapon with which these wars are fought.

Welcome to “Harold Pinter 101,” a time-honored, follow-the-numbers, almost numbingly familiar introduction to the work of one of the world’s greatest living playwrights. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with this sort of approach to Pinter. It’s just that this particular set of theme-and-variations has been repeated so many times that it’s hardened into the sort of received wisdom that conceals as much as it reveals. Shall we round up the usual suspect phrases, run ’em up the flagpole and see if they still fly? “Comedy of menace.” “The weasel under the cocktail cabinet.” “A Hitchcock film with the final reel missing.” And, of course, there’s the most Pinteresque buzz-word of them all, that infinitely resonant…PAUSE.

The problem with such clichés is not that they’re false. Quite the contrary. It’s that the truths they convey are all too self-evident. Their very obviousness becomes as much an impediment to clear thinking as all those platitudes and non-sequiturs that perpetually chase their own tails in Pinter’s plays.
 

But if ever the moment was ripe for Americans to try and re-think the whole subject of Pinter—to re-evaluate his legacy and ask the tough questions about (just for starters) his relationship to the British theatrical revolution of l956, to the larger European tradition of “the absurd” on the one hand and “realism” on the other, his debt to Beckett, David Mamet’s debt to him, etc., etc.—that moment is now.

Thanks to the enterprising Michael Colgan of Dublin’s Gate Theatre and Nigel Redden, director of New York’s Lincoln Center Festival, Americans were able to see a very provocative sampling of Pinter’s work—nine plays in all, plus ten films for which Pinter wrote the screenplays—at Lincoln Center last July. The productions were performed in repertory and were produced by companies that all have a longstanding association with Pinter: the Almeida and the Royal Court of London and Colgan’s own company, the Gate of Dublin.

This was in many ways an aficionado’s festival, with seven of the nine plays not usually studied in “Pinter 101.” Aside from a spectacular production of The Homecoming, directed by Robin Lefevre for the Gate, the festival focused on unusual pairings of Pinter’s one-act plays. It featured, for example, a wonderful career-sandwiching double bill of Pinter’s very first play, The Room (1957), side-by-side with his most recent play, Celebration (2000); a rarely produced work from 1972 called Monologue; two fascinating juxtapositions of the overtly “political” and the more resolutely “metaphysical” plays—double bills of One for the Road (1984) and A Kind of Alaska (1982), and the even more provocative pairing of Mountain Language (1988) and Ashes to Ashes (1996). Rounding out this cross-section of plays was one of Pinter’s most lyrical (and exquisitely musical) dove-tailings of “he said/she said” monologues, Landscape (l967).

Some people, including some critics, lamented the absence of their old favorites: The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Dumb Waiter, Old Times, No Man’s Land. Festival curator Colgan, if asked to defend these omissions, would probably answer with four terse words: “Been there, done that.” For this was in fact the third such Pinter festival Colgan has organized.  So there’s no getting around the fact that the 2001 Pinter festival wasn’t as comprehensive as say, the Samuel Beckett festival (also curated by Colgan) that Lincoln Center produced in l996. But this year’s event offered, by way of compensation, something that ultimately proved revelatory: Pinter’s own direct participation as actor, director and public speaker. Pinter himself portrayed the suave but insecure interrogator in One for the Road. He also directed the Almeida’s double bill of The Room and Celebration; and he was publicly interviewed by Mel Gussow of the New York Times. Factor in the opportunity to see the exceedingly rare film that Peter Hall made of The Homecoming in 1973, as well as the cinematic version of The Caretaker that Clive Donner directed in 1964, and the stage is set for a major re-evaluation of Pinter’s career.

Indeed, the real insights to be gleaned from this event are directly related to the ways in which Pinter’s plays have benefited over the years from his deep, ongoing immersion in acting, directing and screenwriting. The logical place to begin this reconsideration is probably with the Almeida’s double bill of The Room and Celebration: This way we can hone in on Pinter from both ends of his career simultaneously.

‘The Room’ takes place in a seedy cockney bed-sit. A mysterious figure is said to be waiting in the basement, eager to deliver a message to one of the room’s inhabitants. His eventual entrance into her space precipitates an act of violence that objectifies the accumulating menace and fear—simmering, subterranean emotions that had previously remained implicit in the character’s verbal by-play.

Celebration is set at the other end of the social spectrum: in a chi-chi, obscenely expensive London restaurant whose nouveau riche clientele are periodically interrupted by a cheeky waiter who invariably inquires, “Do you mind if I make an interjection?” Each “interjection” is triggered by the claim that he’s just heard them speaking about whatever topic he seems breathlessly eager to address at that moment (e.g., “It’s just that I heard you talking about T.S. Eliot a little bit earlier this evening.”)

These pronouncements come as news to both the diners and to those of us in the audience who’ve been following the characters’ every word. But then, seizing the advantage, this (presumably) working-class waiter proceeds to tell a series of hilariously improbable tall tales in which he maintains that his grandfather had tea with Mussolini, played poker with Winston Churchill and palled around with virtually everyone listed in the celebrity register, including Igor Stravinsky, Franz Kafka and the Three Stooges.

As usual, the torrents of language that pour from the mouths of seemingly brazen Pinter characters like this waiter never fully mask the insecurities that prompt them. When his customers drift out of the exclusive dining area later that evening, and the exit door slams shut, the waiter is left behind—painfully alone, looking more than a little lost, isolated in a powerfully resonating silence. Celebration concludes with his turning toward the audience and confessing, “My grandfather introduced me to the mystery of life and I’m still in the middle of it. I can’t find the door to get out.”

What, if anything, can we conclude from this bird’s-eye overview of Pinter’s career to date? If nothing else, between The Room in l957 and Celebration in 2000, both Pinter and his characters would appear to have “moved up” in the world. But the differences between bacon and eggs (the plat du jour in the first scene of The Room) and osso buco (its culinary equivalent in Celebration) prove much less significant than the “family resemblances” that unite these two works.

In Pinter’s first play, the room was invaded from the outside. In his most recent one-act, the room itself becomes a trap, an enveloping maze that blocks the characters’ access to the outside world. But in both instances, the action is set (or contained) within the sort of room that would seem to link Pinter more to 19th-century realism than to the tradition of “the theatre of the absurd” (which reaches its aesthetic apogee in the plays of Pinter’s great friend and mentor, Samuel Beckett). The “room”—as things turn out—isn’t just the title of Pinter’s earliest play, it’s the Ur-setting for many of Pinter’s most durable works.

Indeed, the walls of “the room” are nowhere more confining—and nowhere more solid—than in Pinter’s masterwork from l965, The Homecoming. Whether on page or on stage, the first thing one notices about The Homecoming is its setting: Here’s the way Pinter describes it in his stage directions:

An old house in North London. A large room, extending the width of the stage. The back wall, which contained the door, has been removed. A square arch shape remains. Beyond it, the hall. In the hall a staircase, ascending U.L., well in view…

Indeed, in this vast room, everything (and everyone) is well in view. The open (but walled-in) setting leaves no place to hide: a perfect space for the excavation of deep, dark family secrets. When Teddy, the son who’s “escaped” to America, returns home for the purpose of introducing his wife to the all-male clan that inhabits this room (his father, his uncle and two brothers), he proudly describes his “ancestral” home in the following passage:

What do you think of the room? Big, isn’t it? It’s a big house. I mean, it’s a fine room, don’t you think? Actually there was a wall, across there…with a door. We knocked it down…years ago…to make an open living area. The structure wasn’t affected, you see. My mother was dead.

This is surely one of the strangest—and most mysteriously reverberant—linkages between character and setting in all of dramatic literature. And it tells us a great deal about what makes Pinter Pinter.
Neither The Room (an early and imperfect work, but one that provides a revealing glimpse of Pinter-in-the-making) nor Celebration (for all its incidental pleasures, probably Pinter-past-his-prime) is set in quite so unusual a room. The quality these two one-acts share, though, with his masterpiece The Homecoming (as well as with many of his greatest plays, including The Birthday Party, The Caretaker and Old Times) is a stylistic commitment to what might be called theatrical neo-realism. In the world of Harold Pinter, it often seems that the more solid the walls, the more solid the plays.

And this in turn leads to a question that cuts to the very heart of Pinter’s originality: Wasn’t modernist drama (prior to Pinter) supposed to have liberated the theatre from precisely this sort of confined space, a box set in which the typical “well-made play” was housed during the l9th century? One of the great achievements of the late plays of both Ibsen and Strindberg, for example, was to have imagined their way beyond the claustrophobic confines of the fourth wall. Indeed, the visionary modernist stage designer Robert Edmund Jones once referred derisively to all those “tasteful, well-furnished rooms with one wall missing.”

Certainly, Samuel Beckett would never have set a play in as, shall we say, “realistic” a setting as that which accommodates the Gate Theatre’s Homecoming. And there’s nothing in Pinter’s dramaturgy as overtly metaphorical as the ash cans inhabited by Nagg and Nell in Endgame, the growing mound of sand that envelops Winnie in Happy Days, the pinspot of light which isolates the mouth of the single speaker in Not I—not to mention the madly proliferating chairs in Ionesco’s The Chairs or the mirrored brothel, the hall of illusions, in Genet’s The Balcony.

So, yes—Pinter does indeed return the art of serious playwriting to the sort of “room” that serious playwriting (prior to Pinter) was supposed to have outgrown. Yet, in the final analysis, Pinter’s room is a room with a difference, a room with a secret. His confined spaces appear—at least initially—to welcome us back from the black abyss of modernism to a sense of security and familiarity promised by solid walls (i.e., the room as surrogate womb). But the essence of Pinter’s strategy might be paraphrased as follows: If you really want to tug the rug out from under your audience’s preconceptions, it helps to begin with a real rug. For Pinter knows that the deepest terrors, the profoundest mysteries, hover in and around the most realist-looking of details.

Pinter’s practice of theatrical neo-realism is a far cry from the onstage world that most absurdist plays occupy, but an equally far cry from 19th-century realism. In fact, Pinter’s plays are what “realism” looks like after Beckett, after the intervention of the tradition of “the absurd.”
The closest aesthetic parallel is probably the emergence of “photo-realist” painters like Richard Estes in the late l960s and early ’70s. Photo-realism is painting’s attempt to re-connect with “the real world” after a half-century of abstraction. The art critic Linda Nochlin, in the l971 essay “Realism Now,” wrote:

New Realism, far from being an aberration or a throwback in contemporary art, is a major innovating impulse. Its precise quality of novelty…lies more in its connection with photography…the film or even with the advanced novel, than its relation to traditional realist painting.

Many of the paintings Nochlin refers to can initially be mistaken for photographs. Then, upon closer examination, one realizes that they are in fact instances of paint-on-canvas. But often what the painter used as his “model” was not the real world per se, but a photograph of the real world. Thus the artist’s connection to this outside world is unabashedly mediated and subjective, much less straightforward than that of the 19th-century realist who often believed that he or she had directly transcribed “the thing itself.” To the neo-realist, a philosophically fraught word like “reality” can only be uttered when placed in quotation marks. The same can be said for Pinter’s neo-realism. Needless to say, it is by no means an unselfconscious throwback to the days of Emile Zola.

The history of every art form can be viewed as the swing of a pendulum back and forth between the claims of observation and imagination. Thus all forms of realism—even the most sophisticated mode of neo-realism—are motivated primarily by a felt need to move art back in the general direction of observed experience. Or in the case of an artist like Pinter, this impulse can refer as much or more to overheard experience. No playwright has ever possessed a better ear for the way people actually speak than Harold Pinter.

Again, the most instructive comparison is with Beckett. In the early stages of their development, Beckett’s manuscripts sometimes contained marginal notes suggesting that the situation be “vaugened” (one of Beckett’s Joycean coinages which meant in effect: Move away from the observed particular toward a more fully imagined and universal metaphor). By contrast, as Michael Billington notes in his marvelous biographical study, The Life and Work of Harold Pinter, “It has always been assumed that [Pinter’s] plays sprang more or less fully formed from his imagination and were largely divorced from private circumstance. The more I discovered about the plays, however, the more they seem to be connected to Pinter’s recollections of his own experience.”

Of course, Beckett’s plays may, at their point of origin, be just as rooted in private, observed experience. But what I want to argue is that Pinter’s finished plays retain a deeper connection to “life-as-lived” than do Beckett’s. And as a result, the plays of Pinter offer us a better solution than do Beckett’s to one of the biggest dilemmas the theatre faces in the age of the cinema—a dilemma, I might add, that has only deepened during the so-called “postmodern era” of recent years, a period increasingly impatient with (perhaps even suspicious of) the achievements of a high modernist like Beckett (whose work comes to feel a bit too insular, too rarefied, too far removed from life as lived in the “real world”). Although the genesis of this argument can be found in the writings of Alain Robbe-Grillet (and in Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation”), it’s my belief that no one has articulated this particular dilemma—and its relation to the theatre—more clearly than the film critic David Denby in his l985 essay “Stranger in a Strange Land” (subtitled “a moviegoer at the theatre”). Denby is attempting to account for the basic uneasiness he almost always feels at the theatre. “For a moviegoer like myself,” he writes:

…the theatre seems caught in a gigantic double-bind. The closer it comes to realistic representation, the more it betrays how inadequate it is next to the cinema; the further away from representation it moves, the more it loses contact with what interests us in the world and becomes preoccupied with the means of its own existence.

By this he means a variety of meta-theatre, an exercise in “self-reflexive modernism” that ultimately focuses its attention on the metaphysics of the medium itself rather than zooming in on “what interests us in the world.” In other words—according to Denby—the theatre’s only alternative to a hopelessly naïve form of realistic representation is an anti-illusionistic examination of its own means and materials. “Illusion” (the illusion of conventional realism), observes Denby:

…has become the province of the intellectually timid, because the only thing “real” in the theatre is the actors holding the stage and the audience watching them. Isn’t that why almost every clever modern play seems to be about the theatre itself? What else can a smart modern play be about?

But what of the deeply theatrical metaphors of a playwright like Beckett? Don’t they pose an acceptable alternative to naïve realism? Part of the problem is that metaphor—which we usually think of as the raison d’etre of serious, non-illusionistic theatre—is itself a principal source of Denby’s discomfort:

In the theatre almost everything…is a metaphor….A sole chair on an empty stage, precisely because it is yanked out of its normal relationship with other chairs or a table or a sideboard, is a portentous symbol….Well, so what? Aren’t there good metaphors and bad? And isn’t there good staging and bad? Good acting and bad? Yes, of course, but what I’m trying to get at is the basic uneasiness that some of us feel in the theatre, and I think some of our pain may derive from an unacknowledged notion of the proper relation of representation to metaphor and symbol. In the movies if you turn on the camera, you can photograph trees, or city streets, or the grimy stacks of a steel mill, and all these things are blessedly free of any extra significance…

Hence the double bind, the apparent no-win situation for the theatre in the age of the cinema on the one hand and a kind of “metaphor fatigue” on the other.

The pretext for Denby’s article was an overview of the l985 New York theatre season, an experience that pretty much lived down to his lowest expectations. Significantly though, Denby’s one moment of unqualified enthusiasm came in response to the Broadway production of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross. That play, he writes, “is a moviegoer’s play: it has the hard, cool, non-symbolic quality, the violence, the fullness of a great American movie.” No other major playwright owes as great a debt to Harold Pinter as does David Mamet, and it’s no coincidence that Mamet and Pinter are the two late 20th-century playwrights most deeply involved with—and influenced by—the cinema. Both have found a way of infusing their stage productions with “that hard, cool non-symbolic quality” that Denby associates with the world of the screen. It’s my belief that Pinter’s neo-realism is the best antidote we have for “the double bind” that Denby articulates.

More than any other contemporary writer, Pinter restores to the stage the proper relation (or at least, a more proper relation) of representation to metaphor and symbol. What I’m getting at is the unique relationship between sound and meaning (in the language) and surface and symbol (in the decor and properties) that we find in a great Pinter production.
The metaphors, the symbolic reverberations, when they arise, never displace or disperse this primary sense of physical concreteness. Pinter has written about this suspicion of metaphor—however allusively—in countless speeches: For example, Ruth in The Homecoming responds to the airy, bloodless, pseudo-philosophical banter of her husband and brother-in-law with the following plea:

You’ve forgotten something. Look at me. I...move my leg. That’s all it is. But I wear...underwear...which moves with me...it...captures your attention. Perhaps you misinterpret. The action is simple. It’s a leg...moving. My lips move. Why don’t you restrict...your observations to that? Perhaps the fact that they move is more significant ...than the words which come through them. You must bear that...possibility...in mind.

Earlier, I spoke of the unique relationship between character and décor in a play like The Homecoming. One of the reasons that Denby tends to prefer the movies to the theatre is that he finds in the cinema a fundamentally different relation between the actor and his inanimate surroundings:

In the movies the actor doesn’t have to carry as heavy a burden as he does on stage; a large part of the drama is derived from his relation to his surroundings. The actor matters, but so do the particular clouds passing overhead, the wide-beamed floor, the cars parked on the street. This is why the argument always used in favor of the theatre and against cinema—“the presence of the live actor”—is a little beside the point. In the movies, many things are “present,” and all these things, large and small, animate and inanimate, exist on an equal plane.

Significantly, Denby could here be describing the relationship between actors and objects in the Gate’s production of The Homecoming. The glass of water and the ashtray that Ruth and Lenny manipulate as strategically as chess pieces are—for all practical purposes—characters. And at the same time, a character like Ruth often seems to possess the utter opacity of an inanimate object.

The original production of The Homecoming featured a now-legendary setting by John Bury that was inspired by the paintings of Magritte. But—consistent with Pinter’s neo-realism—the aspect of surrealism it exploited was not the painter’s imaginative distortions of the real world, but rather his “super-realism,” his high-contrast, pseudo-photographic surfaces designed to lend his dreamy visions the solidity of things that can be photographed in the real world.

Indeed, The Homecoming has much in common with the world of a Magritte painting. The scenes in which Ruth engages in sexual foreplay with Lenny and Joey while her husband merely looks on would probably strike most 19th-century realists as some sort of “dream sequence.” (Surely this must be an act of wish fulfillment, they might say. It can’t really be happening…can it?) But it is happening, within the neo-realist world Pinter creates on stage. Martin Esslin has written brilliantly about this aspect of the play: “It is my conviction that The Homecoming, while being a poetic image of a basic human situation, can also stand up to the most meticulous examination as a piece of realistic theatre, and that, indeed, its achievement is the perfect fusion of extreme realism with the quality of an archetypal dream image of wish fulfillment.”

For example, the sequences in which the patriarch Max is divested of his chair (or symbolically, his throne) are simultaneously “realistic,” and yet strangely ritualized—as physically palpable as that glass of water, yet mysteriously reverberant (evoking distant echoes of both Lear and Oedipus). In fact, in the Gate’s production, when Max collapsed beside his chair and begged Ruth for the sort of sexual attention she had already begun to bestow on his sons, he emitted a howl of anguish worthy of Lear in the final scene of Shakespeare’s play.

Both the Oedipal and the Shakespearean dimensions of this production surely owed something to the fact that Max was being played by the incomparable Ian Holm, who recently portrayed Lear in a very fine production of Shakespeare’s tragedy at the Royal National in London. (Parenthetically, Holm’s last appearance in New York was back in l967 when he created the role of Lenny in the original production of The Homecoming. So the Gate’s production was, among other things, a true Holm-coming. And in what is surely one of the ultimate plays about fathers and sons, it must be a very strange experience indeed to portray your own father 34 years after having originated the role of his son.)
But a good production of Pinter’s masterwork doesn’t require these extra sources of association in order to create an utterly distinctive relationship between surface (with its “cool, hard non-symbolic quality”) and subterranean reverberations that feel both ancient and mythic.

And it’s Pinter’s highly original use of “the room” that enables him to achieve what Denby might recognize as a perfect relationship between representation and metaphor. The vast room in which The Homecoming takes places comes to feel as ancient, primitive and patriarchal as a Paleolithic cave. But it never becomes a conventional “symbol” for a cave—or anything else, for that matter. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, Pinter’s room is a room is a room. Of course, on some level(s), it’s also a womb and a tomb (even a cave); but unlike the overly symbolic spaces of earlier absurdist drama, when you get there, there is a there there. And that, more than anything else, is what I mean when I call Pinter a neo-realist.

There’s a lovely passage in Landscape that tells us a great deal about Pinter’s style of neo-realism. The subject is figure drawing, but it also seems to describe the way Pinter draws the contours of his world on stage:

BETH: I remembered always, in drawing, the basic principles of shadow and light. Objects intercepting the light cast shadows. Shadow is deprivation of light. The shape of the shadow is determined by that of the objects. But not always. Not always directly. Sometimes it is only indirectly affected by it. Sometimes the cause of the shadow cannot be found.
PAUSE
But I always bore in mind the basic principles of drawing.
PAUSE
So that I never lost track. Or heart.
PAUSE

No one knows better than Harold Pinter that “sometimes the cause of the shadow cannot be found.” And yet he insists on following “the basic principles of drawing.” It’s Pinter’s way of making sure that he never loses track. Or heart. AT

Roger Copeland has published articles about theatre and dance in the New York Times, the Village Voice, the New Republic and American Theatre.

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