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MR. PINTER'S BELINDA THE BASIC QUESTION, PROBABLY, is where has Pinter been going since The Caretaker? From The Roam to The Caretaker, with one or two exceptions, his work seems all of a piece. It concerns people living pretty much alone and if or when they have made the crucial adjustment to society there will be time for them to think of other things. Pinter himself has always insisted that he deliberately chooses a brief but climactic moment in their lives, and that there is no reason to suppose that they do not have girl friends or political beliefs, but the impression remains of shabby people in shabby rooms threatened by enigmatic interior or exterior forces. In one of the "Comedies of Menace" the initial crude physical violence of The Room was gradually refined without in any way lessening the intensity, and with this refinement the comedy became more uncertain. Laughter at the later plays was often relief from what they were implying. Television liberated Pinter from his shabby room, or at least coincided with a movement out. His characters were younger, more elegant and articulate, and their apartments more spacious and tasteful. The battle for domination now centered obviously on sex. Characters are now "in society" and concerned with this particular, personal, relationship. Illusions and lies, always a part of the Pinter strategy (it has never been easy to tell where fact ends and fiction or fancy begins) are now used as an instrument for achieving or maintaining a relationship of a sexual kind with another person. But the expectations aroused by comedies like The Collection and The Lover were baffled by Tea Party and confounded by The Homecoming. The introduction of sex into Pinter's world raised another question, namely his ability to create women characters. In spite of Vivien Merchant's playing these parts, in the early plays women were on the whole old. When they became young and sexually involved they still remained curiously passive in the action of the play. The wife, Stella, in The Collection causes, we are told, the action of the play, but it is a play about three men; in The Lover it is the husband who calls the tune, while Tea Party is a play seen from Disson's point of view. Even The Homecoming, where Ruth emerges as a strong character, seems to be a play about the male response to a female intruder: Ruth is the catalyst to show up the behaviour of five men. Finally, the bafflement with a play like The Homecoming or Tea Party, with their undeniable technical competence, often led critics to 173 174 MODERN DRAMA September admit brilliant expertise but suggest that that was all there was: beautifully done, but to what end? I should like to propose an answer to the final query in terms of the preceding questions. I believe that the design of Pinter's work in the post-Caretaker period has been remarkably clear-cut and there for all to see, and that it had been prepared for in the plays up to The Caretaker. This is not, of course, to suggest that Pinter sat down and worked it out but merely that there is an organic inevitability in the order of the plays if looked at from the point of view in which they were written. Or, more modestly, to offer that point of view as a useful way of looking at them. I shall begin with The Homecoming whose brilliant theatrical impact did not conceal an uneasiness as to its moral direction. In a recent Sunday Times survey the play was mentioned in terms of "an obscene sub-text" and Chekhov nightmare, which elicited the following response from a female reader: To a woman the play is a detached and witty parable. It meticulously peels off the layers of hypocrisy concealing the prevailing attitudes to woman's morality. It says that in the context of this increasingly criminal society a woman can be a wife, mother and, if she wishes, whore. And that men will like her that way. This may be a nightmare to some men but many women must have felt a sense of...

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