Pinter's Comic Play by Elin Diamond (review)

Book Reviews 437 assumptions include a reference to "the Ballybeg soccer team" (p. 48), though Donegal is defiantly Gaelic Athletic Association territory; an allusion to Yeats's "Easter 1916" as "written ODe year after the event" (p. 2), though the Collected Poems gives September 25, 1916; a translation ofO'easey's Nyadnanave as "nest of knaves" (p. 18). instead of the ironical "nest of saints"; and a rather skewed interpretation of Bessie Burgess's reaction to the rhetoric of the Figure in O'Casey's Plough (p. 11). Two distinct stage-areas in Da he coalesces (pp. 56-57), and there is confusion in his chronology of the action of Philadelphia (pp. 49-50). Moreover, can one say of a memory that surfaces only twice in Friel's play that it "keeps recurring" (p. 49); should one, indeed, ever say "keeps recurring"? Whether attributable to careless proof-reading, poor editing. or the hazards of the printing process, this slim volume contains an inordinate number ofdistracting errors. In the chapter on Friel's Translations, which emphasizes, as does the play. the sanctity of place-names, "Poll na gCaorach" appears as "Poll nag Caorach"; earlier, "BaUybeg" as "Balleybeg" (pp. 89, 5I). Quotations fare no better: "dallyin' ", from O'Casey, becomes "dallin'" (p. 9); "here", from Yeats, "hear" (p. 3 I); "strong silent men", from Friel, "silent strong men" (p. 49), and, in a passage from Leonard, the omission of its initial word, "Anyone", reduces the second sentence to gibberish (p. 53). There are two items of inept dash-bracketing (pp. 82, 86), and loose syntax creates the ludicrous ambiguity of Da's escaping "from the hotel for elderly people where Charley now had placed him by climbing over a wall" (p. 52). S.F. GALLAGHER, TRENT UNIVERSITY ELIN DIAMOND. Pinter's Comic Play. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press 1985. pp. 241, illustrated. $29·50. Laughter in Pinter's drama is not an unequivocal experience. The absurdity of Pinier's plays, as Katherine Burkman put it a few years ago, is that they "do not evoke laughter and tears as much as they prevent the full experience of either." Several critics, convinced of the essentially comic matrix of Pinter's plays yet perturbed by the possibility of a birth defect in the offspring, have tried to catch Pinter's drama in the net of "dark comedy" or tragicomedy. On the whole, critics from J.L. Styan to Bernard Dukore have not been terribly successful in their grappling with the mongrel genre tragicomedy; Dukore's Where Laughter Stops: Pinter's Tragicomedy (1976) for example proved to be a rather unsubtle book that catalogued with numbing pedantry those instances in Pinter's plays he considered funny , very funny indeed, hilarious, amusing, and prompting laughter. Diamond professes little patience with Dukore's schematization based on the supposition that moments "where laughter stops" can unequivocally be identified; although she avoids the tenn tragicomedy, the tragicomic is implied in much of what she has to say about Pinter's revision of the conventional uses of comedy, to wit, the way Book Reviews Pinter makes his audiences leave the theatre "haunted by their own laughter." Diamond's argument is predicated on the assumption that Pinter's plays, while basically unverifiable, achieve the appearance of stability through various forms ofcomedy. "As problematic as the unexplained anxieties of Pinter's characters is the comic response such anxiety provokes," says Diamond. ''If Harold Pinter's comedy springs from traditional roots, he undercuts our laughter even as he invites it." In making the focus of her analysis the "subtle relationship between traditional stage comedy and uneasy audience response," Diamond is able to offer several thoughtful discussions of Pinter's plays. Her readings of plays originally written for television, especially The Collection, are illuminating, and her very fine treatment of The Homecoming, this most intriguing work in the Pinter canon, is as adequate as one has any right to expect to the challenges posed by the play itself. "No psychologically coherent explanation can account for Ruth's emblematically serene presence on stage," she says. "We feel like witnesses of a spectacle whose action has unravelled with the force of inevitability, yet throughout the play the...