Pinter and Whiting: Two Attitudes Towards the Alienated Artist

PINTER AND WIDTING: TWO ATTITUDES TOWARDS THE ALIENATED ARTIST Two CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH PLAYS, recently produced by the San Francisco Actor's Workshop, create in drama an image that has already absorbed poet and novelist-the alienated artist. A difficult figure to present on the stage, an artist is the hero of Harold Pinter's Birthday Party and of John Whiting's Saint's Day, both published before production , in 1957. Whiting, born in 1917, is a journalist and critic as well as playwright, and has been active in such organizations as the Arts Council of Great Britain and the League of Dramatists. Pinter, born in 1930, spent twelve years as an actor in provincial repertory companies. Both dramatists are well known in the English experimental theater, and it is the Actor's Workshop which introduced them to American audiences. In each of the plays, the isolated artist is opposed to society. In Pinter's Birthday Party, society is the villain; in Whiting's Saint's Day, society is the victim. The major struggle of the hero of Birthday Party, Stanley Webber, is to resist the straightjacket of cliches which society would force upon him. Paul Southman, the poet-hero of Saint's Day, angrily rejects society only to become the agent of personal and social disaster. The dramatic method of these playwrights is as different as their attitudes. Pinter, though writing in the tight symbolic mode of Beckett, depends upon elements of conventional realism. For most of the first act of Birthday Party, the shabby boarding house and banal exchanges seem typical of lower middle-class comedy. Slowly, however, the realistic surface acquires symbolic meaning: the Boles' boarding house, its stale atmosphere almost untouched by the bustling outside world, comes to represent the refuge of the artist. Although Meg Boles protests that' her house is "on the list," there is doubt that it is a boarding house at all. Its dubious status and run-down condition perfectly reflect the predicament of the only boarder, Stanley Webber, whose slovenly manner suggests that at the moment he too is not "on the list." With the entrance of the mysterious gentlemen, Goldberg and McCann, the realistic level is submerged. Together, they represent not a type but a world in which Pinter concentrates the vulgar, sadistic tendencies of our time. 402 1962 PINTER AND WHITING 403 In contrast to Pinter's tightly structured play, Whiting weaves many characters and situations into a complicated, multi-level plot. The world of Saint's Day is diffused into the figures of poet, cleric, mother, soldier, servant, villager. Three artists represent different attitudes towards social responsibility. Insisting that he has been "driven out" of society, Paul Southman claims the martyrdom of a persecuted saint. Charles, the young artist-husband of Southman's granddaughter, regards himself as a deserter, though he scorns social approval. The Oxford poet, Procathren, does not wish to become involved in a "partisan way." The realistic surface of Saint's Day is never violated, and only in retrospect are the symbolic overtones evident. Most pointed are the ironic echoes of a Christian judgment day, which the ancient Saint Paul so confidently predicted. In his opening lines, Whiting's poethero , the modem Paul, warns his servant, "As it threatens at all times we must be prepared." Not until late in the play, upon the arrival of Christian Melrose and his soldiers, does the judgment day theme clearly emerge. The development of this theme, emphasizing the personal disaster of Paul's isolation, extends the artist's failure from social irresponsibility to malevolent destructiveness. Though Pinter and Whiting treat their theme very differently, there are striking similarities in the broad outlines of Birthday Party and Saint's Day. Both plays begin with the artist entrenched in an isolation intended to shield him from social encroachment. The groggy, unshaven piano-player of Birthday Party, Stanley Webber, is the only boarder at the lonely seaside home of Meg and Petey Boles. The once-celebrated poet of Saint's Day, Paul Southman, retired many years ago to a decaying country house which he now shares with his granddaughter , Stella, and her artist-husband, Charles. Physical isolation emphasizes the rift with society...