Pinter at 70: A Casebook ed. by Lois Gordon, and: The Pinter Ethic: The Erotic Aesthetic by Penelope Prentice (review)

Reviews 127 LOIS GORDON, ed. Pillter at 70: A Casebook. New York: Roulledge, 200 1. Pp. 342, illustrated. $27.95 (Pb). PENELOPE PRENTICE. The Pinter Ethic: The Erotic Aesthetic. 2nd ed. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000. Pp. cxvi +452. $85.00 (Hb); $24.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Kellie Bean, Marshall Ulliversity Critics have a kind of crush on Harold Pinter. He is a powerful presence witty , humane, and angry - and he commands international attention when he speaks. Indeed, like G.B. Shaw or David Mamet, Pinter's persona sometimes threatens to replace critical consideration of his works. Pinter at 70: A Casehook and The Pinter Ethic: The Erotic Aesthetic both provide ample evidence of Pinter's wit, biography, and political convictions, and both are, in their own ways, love letters to the man himself. A re-edited paperback version of the 1990 hardback edition, Pinter at 70: A Casehook includes four new pieces - three essays and a list of Pinter's achievements in the theatre. Populated by inveterate Pinter fans, Lois Gordon 's casebook offers itself as, according to the blurb on the back cover, a "fitting tribute" to the playwright. This celebratory tone begins with the General Editor's note, in which Kimball King suggests that Pinter's contribution to contemporary theatre outstrips Samuel Beckett's and calls him the "'Shakespeare' of his age" (ix). In her preface to the second edilion, Gordon observes, "He is known to his family and friends as a person of uncommon loyalty, generosity, and kindness" (xii). One is grateful for this admiration when perusing the bibliography assembled by Gordon, which is impressively thorough and quite useful. Still, one must worry when a text is as full of loving hyperbole as this one is. [n another instance, King asserts: "It remained for Pinter to alter expectations of drama permanently [...J; and the language, action, and meaning of all peliormalZce art is inevitably measured against his achievement" (243; my emphasis). Like so much mainstream drama criticism, this statement suffers from a myopia regarding anything taking place in theatre outside the mainstream, of which Harold Pinter is an acknowledged giant, but which in no way reflects the totality of the dramatic arts. Gordon includes pieces that reflect the variety of Pintercriticism, and many of these essays point to this sometimes befuddling range as the paradoxical result of Pinter's singular vision. For example, George E. Wellwarth offers a reading that is, he argues, a tonic to the "extraordinary interpretations of Pinter's plays that have been foisted on us by scholars drunk on appearance instead of sobered by reality" (95). This "long overdue" critique includes the assertion that "the time has come to recognize the fact that Pinter is the only critic who has made any sense of Pinter" (96). Still, Wellwarth gives it a go and interprets Pinter's dramas as "situation pieces that encapsulate an atmo- 128 REVIEWS sphere or mood, often vague in its specifics but emotionally pervasive" (99). David Lodge's "Last to Go: A Structuralist Reading" provides a similarly precise distillation of the critical conundrum driving nearly all Pinter criticism: "How is it that dialogue superficially so banal, repetitive and full of silences, and a narrative so ambiguous and exiguous can interest and entertain an audience or reader?" (61). Even though he explicates and systematizes Pinter's sketch in a manner entirely at odds with Wellwarth's approach, Lodge ends up in very much the same place. Dialogue maintains "contact" between interlocutors but fails to "[convey] much information between them" (62). When perfonned before an audience, this dialogue becomes "an object of aesthetic rather than sociolinguistic interest" (62); and in the end, the sketch can be summarized as follows: "Speech is to Silence as George is to the last newspaper to go" (74). These very different essays demonstrate the value of disparate approaches to Pinter's work; both manage to shed new light on much discussed works, and both do it with little help from Pinter. Ann C. Hall contributes one of the three new essays, and her intriguing thesis complicates conventional treatments of storytelling in drama. "Storytelling in Pinter" draws effective parallels between Pinter's recent, overtly political works...