Time and Harold Pinter's Possible Realities: Art as Life, and Vice Versa

Time and Harold Pinter's Possible Realities: Art as Life, and Vice Versa BARBARA KREPS IF WE COMPARE PLAYS such as Silence, Landscape, Monologue, and Old Times with plays such as The Room, The Birthday Party, A Slight Ache, or The Dumb Waiter, one thing that seems immediately clear is that Harold Pinter has undergone considerable evolution in his career as a playwright. And yet, when we look at the few official statements Pinter has released over the years about the vision that lies behind these plays, what seems to be equally clear is that he has, from the beginning, been concerned with elaborating a single idea. On March 8, 1960, the program brochure for The Room and The Dumb Waiter contained a printed sheet of paper in which, among other things, Pinter said: "The desire for verification is understandable but cannot always be satisfied. There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. The thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. The assumption that to verify what has happened and what is happening presents few problems I take to be inaccurate.'" In an address to drama students at Bristol in 1962, Pinter incorporated this statement into his speech and expanded it: I'm speaking with some reluctance. knowing that there are at least twenty-four possible aspects of any single statement. depending on where you're standing at the time or on what the weather's like.... Apart from any other consideration, we are faced with the immense difficulty, if not the impossibility. of verifying the past. I don't mean 47 48 BARBARA KREPS merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning. What took place. what was the nature of what took place, what happened? If one can speak of the difficulty of knowing what in fact took place yesterday. one can 1 think treat the present in the same way. What's happening now? We won't know until tomorrow or in six months' ti me. and we won't know then, we'll have forgotten. or our imagination will have attributed quite false characteristics to today. ... We will all interpret a comm on experience quite differently, though we prefer to subscribe to the view that there's a shared common ground, a known ground. I think there's a shared common ground all right, but that it's more like a quicksand. Because "reality" is quite a strong firm word we tend to think, or to hope, that the state to which it refers is equally firm. settled and unequivocal. It doesn't seem to be, and in my opinion. it's no worse or better for that.2 In December, 1971, Pinter granted an interview to Mel Gussow in connection with the New York opening of Old Times. One thing that emerges from that interview is that Pinter still had not significantly revised his earlier views about the slipperiness of time and of the facts that are commonly supposed to have been fixed in time: GUSsow. From your point of view the literal fact of a meeting or of a sexual relationship doesn't really matter. PINTER. No, it doesn't. The fact is it's terribly difficult to define what happened yesterday. So much is im agined and that imagining is as true as real. GUSsow. Does the possibility that the meeting might not have taken place make the relationship less meaningful? PIN TER. No. The facl Ihal Ihey discuss somelhing thaI he says took place - even if it did not take place- actually seems to me to recreate the time and the momen ts vividly in the present, so that it is actually taking place before your very eyeS - by the words he is using. By the end of this particular section of the play, they are sharing something in the presentJ In his plays, revues, and sketches, from The Room to No Man's Land, this difficulty in verifying "what happened" remains one of Pinter's central themes, and this problem of verifying the past naturally leads to (or grows from - in...