How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (47 page)

And it was certainly true of
Ashes to Ashes
, which yet again pairs a dreamily nostalgic woman and a hard-nosed man in a fruitless dialogue. But this time, the woman's erotic reveries, out of which the man keeps trying to rouse her, are about a man much like Nicolas in
One for the Road
: he's a figure of some kind of sinister authority who sexually humiliated her—“Kiss my fist,” she recalls him ordering her—and was, it turns out, responsible for the death of her baby. This makes for some creepy moments. But while the sinister surface hints at a connection between eros and violence and oppression, it's hard to cash out just what it is that connects them, or what that might mean, because there's nothing really there apart from the sinister surface. (In Pinter's works about torture and totalitarianism you find yourself wishing for the moral subtlety and emotional complexity of Jacobo Timerman.) Ironically, it may be that the superficiality and unpersuasiveness of this and so much else of what was presented at Lincoln Center have to do with the fact that the times have caught up with Pinter. The silences, pauses, hesitations, disorientations, the subtle indictments of talk without signification and action without effect, of the inadequacy of traditional personal and political narratives, which once seemed groundbreaking and new, have been so internalized by postmodern, post-political culture that many of the plays seem almost like period pieces. These extremely reverent productions only emphasized that impression; if anything, the productions seemed to outweigh the plays themselves.

 

It would be hard to think of a better symbol for the way in which Pinter's work has devolved into showy displays of “Pinteresque” style than the Lincoln Center performances of
The Homecoming
. As it happened, the 1973 film version of this work, which reunited some of the stars of the original 1964 stage production, was shown during the festival, and hence offered a record, however imperfect, of the play as originally presented—and, to some degree, experienced.

The Homecoming
, a work that is generally considered the cornerstone of the playwright's oeuvre and may well be his masterpiece, is a gruesome domestic tragicomedy about a man and his sons, a kind of scarily bipolar
Death of a Salesman
. Set in an old house in North London, the play follows the acidic interactions between an elderly man named Max (Ian Holm, who played the role of the son Lenny in the original production) and his three grown sons: the seedy underworld entrepreneur Lenny (Ian Hart), the dumb would-be boxer Joey, and the refined Teddy, who's left home for the States years before to become a philosophy professor, and who's now returning with his wife, Ruth, for a visit. As Max interacts with his three “boys” (each of whom can be thought of as representing a different component of the human character: intellect, cunning, brute strength), strange tensions, buried hurts, and a characteristically Pinteresque blend of eros and violence become discernible. By the end of the play, Ruth has engaged in erotic play with all three brothers, and decides to stay on in London, partly as a kind of den mother to these men, partly as a prostitute working for Lenny in order to pay her way.

Of all of Pinter's plays,
The Homecoming
is the most successful in its attempt to fashion a dramatic world in which people say and do everyday things—talk about the past, fix meals, drink glasses of water—and yet, because of the hidden internal logic, the result is anything but everyday. (Critics like to point to Pinter's influence on young contemporary playwrights; Michael Billington, partaking in
The New York Times
's lavish and adulatory coverage of the festival, listed Joe Orton, David Mamet, Neil LaBute, Sarah Kane, and Patrick Marber as the inheritors of the older playwright's “enduring legacy.” But I often wonder whether Pinter's real heir isn't the British filmmaker Peter Greenaway, whose work is also distinguished by the sense it gives
you of a hermetic world whose coherences you must trust in, even if you're not sure what they mean.) In order for the piece to have its proper impact, to produce that characteristic tension between quotidian surfaces and submerged menace, the surfaces have to be persuasively quotidian. Few other playwrights have been so intent on, or successful at, conveying the feel and rhythms of everyday talk and movements, however bizarre or unexpected the eventual result of those words and actions may be.

The film of
The Homecoming
, photographed in drab browns and grays, looks wilted and ordinary, which is just right. (It must be said that the print shown at the Film Society retrospective was embarrassingly inadequate: pitted, pocked, striated to the point of being nearly unwatchable, with a distracting wobbly green vertical line that refused to budge. If Lincoln Center wants to pay homage to cinematic artists, a good start would be to obtain decent prints of their work.) More important, the performances were perfect: the young Ian Holm's Lenny had just the right combination of menacing braggadocio and an underlying weakness, and Vivien Merchant (the first Mrs. Pinter) is brilliant as Ruth, the plainness and openness of her broad face making all the more terrifying, somehow, her character's apparent transformation from a self-effacing, carefully well-mannered housewife into a controlling, sexually manipulative siren.

The Lincoln Center
Homecoming
couldn't have been more different from the film. Fussily directed—choreographed would be a better word—by the Gate Theatre's Robin Lefevre, the action was balletic, artificial, mannered. Ian Holm's Max was excellent; he felt lived-in and shrunken and yet, somehow, still powerful. But the three sons were all, in their way, too attractive, too actor-y. Worst of all was the Ruth of Lia Williams, a model-thin, high-cheekboned blonde with a breathy, Marilyn Monroe voice and creamy pastel suits that made her look like a vintage 1960s Barbie—or, perhaps, a first-class stewardess in a 1960s airline ad. Her whippet-like elegance, the anomalous smartness of her costumes, the high stylization of her delivery all warped the play's crucial dynamics. From the minute Ms. Williams entered, smirkingly confident of her allure, there was no doubt in your mind that she'd take control of these angry, inarticulate men. Because there was no doubt, the play lost its tightly wound tension and, ultimately, its point.

 

So the festival suggested, if anything, the extent to which one strand of Pinter's output—those self-contained works in which any obvious meaning is submerged under the lapidary surfaces and the potent moods and effects they create—have degenerated into increasingly empty exercises in style. As for the works in which there was, unmistakably, “meaning”—
One for the Road
and its spiritual successor,
Mountain Language
(1988), which received a noisy, unfocused production—the substance is obvious (police states are bad), and the presentation of it coarse, obtuse, undigested.

The political plays are meant to be indictments of totalitarian repression, of the way that power corrupts, of the fact that, as the playwright said apropos of
Party Time
, “there are extremely powerful people in apartments in capital cities in all countries who are actually controlling events that are happening on the street in a number of very subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways.” And so, in these works, the playwright depicts torturers manipulating their subjects, or soldiers abusing innocent old women. It is here, in his attempt to engage in substantive political discourse, that the famous flatness of Pinter's surfaces, their odd texturelessness, his tendency to depict rather than to explicate, become a serious liability. It's often hard to sense anything beneath the surface of these works but the author's righteous ire.

In this respect, these overtly political plays—
One for the Road
,
Party Time
,
Mountain Language
, and
Ashes to Ashes
, the latter of which combines the domestic duologue with the political outrage—resemble the poems that Pinter has written, inspired by his sensitivity to the world's injustices. (However much it's overshadowed by his plays, Pinter's poetry is clearly very important to his sense of himself as a writer. “I'm essentially, shall we say, a poet,” he told Charlie Rose when he was in New York for the festival. His fans agree. “An intuitive rather than a conceptual writer, a poet rather than a peddler of theses,” Michael Billington concurred in the
Times
.) One clearly political poem is called “The Old Days,” from 1996:

The political plays, with their heated indictments of tyranny, may be said to be the theatrical analogue of this clanking brand of writing. Unfortunately for Pinter, in order to engage seriously with politics, you have to have “peddled” in theses—you need a rigorous and subtle theoretical grasp of what the issues are, and of what's at stake, in order to make valid judgments of complex issues. Pinter's political plays, by contrast, tend to flash angry images of oppression, and that's that. After you've seen two or three in swift succession, and see how much of a muchness the political work is, it's hard not to wonder whether what they're really about is Pinter, excellently showcasing his anger, his frustration with corrupt democracies, and so on. “I wrote
One for the Road
in anger,” he told Rose. “It was a catharsis…. I felt better after having written it, certainly.” Catharsis, as we know from Aristotle, is an emotion that serious theater may legitimately aim at; but of course, Aristotle was talking about the
audience
's emotions. However admirable his feelings may be, and however urgent his need for catharsis, the catharsis is meaningless, from the point of view of successful art, if it is reserved to the playwright but denied the spectators. Because the characters in these works are rarely more than stick figures—those abusive men and noble, suffering women—your concern for the victims in Pinter's political plays tends to be abstract; you can't be moved to political insight, because you're not moved at all.

So the tendency in these plays is to bully rather than to argue. In
his Charlie Rose appearance, the playwright talked primarily about his political convictions, and about the cynicism and corruption of the United States and Great Britain, which he has frequently denounced in interviews and editorial pages; but, significantly, he never really engaged Rose's objections to some of his points. After Pinter dramatically declared, apropos of the NATO-backed bombings in the former Yugoslavia, that Clinton was morally indistinguishable from Milosevic, Rose raised the quite reasonable objection that whereas the two leaders had used force in Yugoslavia, those uses stemmed from distinct political and moral motivations. Rather than responding, however, Pinter changed the subject, and went on to flourish another indictment—as if merely to have denounced were enough. This is appropriate for activists, but not for artists.

As we know, questions of motivation have never had much allure for Pinter; but while the apparent absence of traditional motivations may have made for some striking theater, the failure to come to grips with intent and motivation in forming moral and political judgments is a serious limitation in someone who wants to be taken seriously as a political dramatist. Pinter's convictions can be laudable, and his support for oppressed East Bloc writers such as his friend Václav Havel was admirably fierce; but the “political” plays unhappily reflect the lack of subtlety of thought that you saw in the Rose interview. In them, we're much closer to
Waiting for Lefty
than we are to
Waiting for Godot
.

There is an irony here. When he was in his early thirties (still in his hermetic, apolitical phase), in his speech to the National Student Drama Festival in Bristol, the newly famous playwright warned against

It would be hard to find a better description right now of Pinter and his later, patently political work. However much he may profess to be outraged by his villains, Pinter has come in some strange way to resemble them. Like the fictional Robert in
The Comfort of Strangers
, he's a man in a position of considerable power whom you begin by trusting, someone who's pulling all the invisible strings, who lures you with the promise of a rich and enjoyable evening, who will even make you laugh with his stories (few playwrights combine humor and horror as disconcertingly as this one) and yet ends by making you watch images of disturbing, sometimes horrifying actions, without ever explaining them. Without, perhaps, being able to explain them, either explicitly or implicitly, because his ultimate concern is his own feelings, his own gratifications. Your only option is to sit there, immobile and mute, and take it.

 

In view of the way in which the Lincoln Center tribute exposed Pinter's weaknesses and pretensions as much as it did his strengths, it was a gratifying surprise to witness the New York première of his most recent work,
Celebration
. First presented in London in the grand millennial year of 2000, this, at last, was a work that brought together all of the playwright's well-known preoccupations, modes of expression, and theatrical tropes. Yet it managed to create something very new for him, and for his audiences—something, finally, that was deeply and movingly political.