Category Archives: Harold Pinter

What do they know of theatre who only theatre know?

Posted on by

“What do they know of theatre who only theatre know?” goes Aleks Sierz’ cautionary exhortation at his Pirate Dog journal, and it is an interesting question, especially from a critical point of view. Levying a broader cultural body of knowledge towards only one of its aesthetic disciplines may not be necessary, but it is enlightening, and it’s enlightening to the extent that it provides a deeper and more subtle context for and understanding of the individual work of art itself. The best critics can call upon this not only to illuminate the work, but also to illuminate the culture from which it arises. Those critics who do this may go overboard, but even in their excesses serve not only the art but the readership as well.

This may be especially true for drama, the art of the spoken word, and music. As it happens, contemporary drama and contemporary music have many points of conceptual contact, and for many dramatists music is far more influential, or at least suggestive, than the work of other dramatists. In an anonymous 1960 review from The Times (UK) about Harold Pinter’s early plays, the critic notes:

To find another artist with whom Mr. Pinter may fruitfully be compared one must look farther afield than drama, or even literature, to Music — to [Anton] Webern, in fact, with whose compositions Mr. Pinter’s plays have much in common. Like Webern he has a taste for short, compressed forms, as in his revue-sketches which are really complete plays five minutes long, and like Webern he inclines to etiolated pointilliste textures, forever trembling on the edge of silence, and to structures elusive, yet so precisely organized that they possess an inner tension nonetheless potent because its sources are not completely understood.”[1]

Never mind the deliberate and appropriate vocabulary of “etiolated” and “pointilliste” — unusual but otherwise perfectly good words that can be found in any dictionary, and even Stephen Sondheim fans will recognize the latter — the reference to one of the major figures of the Second Viennese School snaps out as a reference one likely wouldn’t find in daily theatre journalism these days (I leave it to you to ask why). In this case, the mention is somewhat clairvoyant as well, since in a 1966 interview Pinter confirms the comparison:

INTERVIEWER: Has music influenced your writing, do you think?
PINTER: I don’t know how music can influence writing; but it has been very important for me, both jazz and classical music. I feel a sense of music continually in writing, which is a different matter from having been influenced by it. [Pierre] Boulez and Webern are now composers I listen to a great deal.[2]

As I said, both drama and music are served — those readers unfamiliar with Webern may seek out his music, as those unfamiliar with Pinter may seek out his plays (and others have drawn comparisons between Beckett and Schubert, Barker and Bartok) — and another cultural dimension is opened for both forms. It deghettoizes each of these disciplines — contemporary drama and contemporary music — in the service of a broader cultural discourse. But for this kind of criticism to be written, it must have critics who have done their homework, and for it to be published, it requires editors who believe that journalism is more than a mere business, and has cultural responsibilities similar to those of a public trust.

In a Culture Industry that caters to a fascination with celebrities, however, there’s little place for it, and both critics and editors have rejected such criticism as pedantry (as if any reference to any cultural work outside of popular culture after 1975 or so constitutes “pedantry”). In this excerpt from his 1919  essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” one of the most important texts of Modernist criticism, T.S. Eliot responds, and what he says has as much validity for the critic as for the poet:

I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the métier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.

What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.[3]

The final line denies most categorically both an Art and a Criticism of Celebrity. Those critics and artists who may be more interested in their television appearances, the growth of their Twitter feeds, invitations to gala receptions and openings, their names in advertisements that follow pull-quotes for popular shows, or in the progress of their own professional careers, take heed.

Footnotes
  1. Cited in Martin Esslin, Pinter: A Study of His Plays. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1976, p. 21. [↩]
  2. Interview with Harold Pinter, “The Art of Theater No. 3,” in The Paris Review, Fall 1966. Online at http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4351/the-art-of-theater-no-3-harold-pinter. [↩]
  3. T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Online at http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20489. [↩]

Friday Video: Celebrating Harold Pinter

Posted on by

Harold Pinter.

On 24 January 2010, BBC Two ran a 90-minute program on its Arena series called Harold Pinter–A Celebration, featuring poems and performances memorializing the dramatist, who had died on Christmas Eve, 2008. The first ten minutes of the program are posted below, which features Stephen Rea (reading the poem “Death”), Pinter’s long-time friend Henry Woolf (“Voices in the Tunnel”), a short fragment from Pinter’s final play Celebration, and Douglas Hodge (reading from Pinter’s marvellously funny memoir “Mac,” about Pinter’s acting mentor Anew McMaster). If time is at a premium for you (as it is for all of us), do not miss, especially, Rea’s performance of one of Pinter’s finest poems, which comes first:

In leaving you today, I also offer an excerpt from one of Pinter’s finest plays, the 1975 No Man’s Land, which Michael Gambon read at Pinter’s funeral at the writer’s request. It is one of the most beautiful passages in world drama of the past half-century, and I will allow it to linger:

I might even show you my photograph album. You might even see a face in it which might remind you of your own, of what you once were. You might see faces of others, in shadow, or cheeks of others, turning, or jaws, or backs of necks, or eyes, dark under hats, which might remind you of others, whom once you knew, whom you thought long dead, but from whom you will still receive a sidelong glance, if you can face the good ghost. Allow the love of the good ghost. They possess all that emotion … trapped. Bow to it. It will assuredly never release them, but who knows … what relief … it may give them … who knows how they may quicken … in their chains, in their glass jars. You think it cruel … to quicken them, when they are fixed, imprisoned? No … no. Deeply, deeply, they wish to respond to your touch, to your look, and when you smile, their joy … is unbounded. And so I say to you, tender the dead, as you would yourself be tendered, now, in what you would describe as your life.

When Harold met Ellen

Posted on by

Harold Pinter in 1963

I hadn’t planned on posting anything further on Ellen Stewart’s death last week, but in reading Stephen Bottoms’ Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement I found the following delightful anecdote too good to resist. It says a good deal about both Stewart’s and Pinter’s rather laissez-faire attitude to the institutional conventions of theatre, and particularly their disdain of officialdom and stultifying bureaucracy:

The most noteworthy production [of the first year of La Mama] was the American premiere of Harold Pinter’s one-act play The Room. … Set in a lowly bed-sitting room, which is essentially the play’s central character and subject, Pinter’s play must have benefited atmospherically from being presented within the claustrophobic La Mama basement. … The play, however, was presented without licensing permission: Stewart assumed the production was so low-profile that nobody would care, but her transgression prompted a surprise visit from Pinter himself. In New York for the off-Broadway premiere of The Dumbwaiter and The Collection, he had been interviewed for the Village Voice by Michael Smith, who mentioned the La Mama production to him. Pinter promptly went to the Ninth Street basement with his American agent to demand that performances of The Room be halted forthwith. Yet when the agent angrily informed Stewart that nobody, not even the author, could mount a Pinter play in New York without her permission, the indignant playwright decided to prove her wrong, granting La Mama performance rights on the spot.

More to say about off-off-Broadway and Bottoms’ fine book during the next week, but for now I’d like to note that the Village Voice critic mentioned above, Michael Smith, who played a large role in the writing of Playing Underground, still maintains a Web site on which he briefly discusses his tenure there.

Harold Pinter

Posted on by

Harold Pinter passed away yesterday, 24 December 2008, at the age of 78. The New York Times obituary, credited to Ben Brantley and the late Mel Gussow, is here.

Pinter’s work was central to my finding my own way as a dramatist; The Homecoming and No Man’s Land were among my first experiences of contemporary theatre. More important to me is not his style, which is most easily imitated and parodied (I wasn’t the first to imitate and parody it in my juvenilia, and I won’t be the last), but his example, which is not. No doubt we’ll be hearing a lot about both in the next few days; finally, for me, it will be the example of his intransigence in the face of criticism and his refusal to compromise with the desires of the day that endures, since the voice and style themselves are finally all his own. A few years ago, writing about Pinter’s winning the Nobel Prize, I said:

Lear standing alone on the heath is a universal figure of tragic human consciousness – shorn of the trappings of royalty, of the community, he recognizes the horrifying mockery of the essence of humanity that royalty and community constitute. His enemies are his offspring: love rendered meaningless by death, treachery, his own illusions. Only a small, seemingly insignificant gesture here and there, such as the loosening of a shirt’s button that seems to constrain the final throes of death, offers compassionate respite. So Lear, so Hamm – the reluctant ministrations of his manservant (his son?) Clov still keep them together, alone against an empty world; it isn’t Hamm who shunts his own parents aside, but time and aging and the decay of the body, the vehicle of humanity; an ashcan is his own next stop. Pinter’s own characters (even to the point of parents and children; procreation is no relief, not when the children are Lenny, Teddy and Joey of The Homecoming, the psychotic brothers Aston and Mick of The Caretaker, or the surrogate sons Foster and Briggs of the playacted marriage of Hirst and Spooner in No Man’s Land) are not at all dissimilar. His torturers and victims exist in unnamed countries; this lack of names renders them universal. His simple tables, chairs and bare rooms parallel the bare heath of Lear, the sparsely furnished bunker in which Hamm and Clov spend the last days of life on earth.

What Pinter shares with Shakespeare and Beckett is an increasingly uncomfortable truth in a consumerist age: that all the money, all the success, all the nationalistic or racial pride, all the conviction in our own victimhood, all the conviction in the unerring rightness of our own cause, all the possessions we can collect, all the children we can produce, cannot possibly fill the abyss we pretend to ignore every day. To come face to face with the terrorism of the world, be it a sudden war in Iraq or the plunging of a jet plane into a tall building, the last thing we should do is to pretend that we couldn’t do the same thing ourselves, in the most geopolitical or the most intimate contexts. The most radical, the most revolutionary act that Shakespeare, Beckett and Pinter suggest is to recognize and accept this abyss, and that, to do so, we needn’t do more than glance into the nearest mirror.

I suppose I could add to this, but I prefer to allow Pinter at the last to speak for himself. (There will be much bullshit said, positive and negative, by others about Pinter over the next week or so, along with the sincere appreciations; I think this will be my only post on the matter and leave it at that.) First, there’s Pinter’s 1954 note about Samuel Beckett which can be found in the collection Various Voices, a note that applies just as much to Pinter himself:

The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, way outs, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him. He’s not fucking me about, he’s not leading me up any garden, he’s not slipping me any wink, he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy, he doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not, he hasn’t got his hand over his heart. Well, I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty. His work is beautiful.

And, finally, “Art, Truth & Politics,” Pinter’s 2005 Nobel Prize address, below introduced by David Hare: