Pinter as a Radio Dramatist

Pinter as a Radio Dramatist MARY JANE MILLER • IN ITS MOST EXPERIMENTAL FORM, the radio play has become a performing art familiar to comparatively few people since the advent of television. For a radio play to receive serious attention now, it usually has to become something else - a stage play or a film - and even when its author is the focus of reviews, articles, books or popular attention, the radio work of writers like Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard, Bill Naughton or Robert Bolt is neglected unless it has been adapted for another medium. Yet it is a fundamental premise of dramatic criticism that the form and the content of a play should be inseparable. This is particularly so in the case of plays written for sound broadcasting . A radio play which nses the qualities of sound and silence to the fullest extent cannot be translated into another medium without damage. If such plays use those attributes of radio which are unique - chiefly its intimacy, flexibility and ability to command not only absolute concentration but also active and continuous participation from the listener - then no visual treatment however fluid or evocative can avoid the problem of being too literal- of lessening both the sensual and the intellectual impact of the play. Successful radio dramatists invariably assume that their listeners possess active imaginations to add the completely personal dimension which makes a good radio play memorable to the audience. To demonstrate that Harold Pinter's radio plays work in this way is, I think, to conclude that they are performed under ideal conditions only in the medium for which they were written - that is, on the radio. As a playwright, Pinter possesses several easily identifiable characteristics . One is that he prefers to work with a small cast and a single setting. Most ofthe plays are set in rooms creating a claustrophobic effect. 403 404 MARY JANE MILLER Whether created by sound or visually, the setting is invariably naturalistic in detail. Against this setting the characters act out inexplicable events. In radio, what information Pinter consents to give depends largely on cues like accent and idiom which reveal the speaker's class, geographical roots, and ethnic origin. Like many traditional playwrights, he also gives cues to interpretation through rhythm - the tell-tale repetitions, hesitations, incomplete sentences, phatic noises, and silences on which much of the subtext rests. Pinter's predilection for claustrophobic atmosphere, naturalistic setting, and small casts is also ideal for radio. For a listener, it is easier to keep track of a few voices rather than a large number.1 Technically, one atmospheric location is easier to handle. Acting out Pinter's series of inexplicable situations in front of a naturalistic set creates uneasiness in an audience - a sense ofthreat. Radio can also work this way when naturalistic sound effects are the prelude and backdrop to surrealistic events. However, radio has an added advantage in that the naturalistic context can be faded out from the listener's consciousness and the world of the mind can take over. The radio plays cover roughly the same range of themes dealt with in his stage plays. In A Slight Ache,2 as in The Caretaker and The Homecoming, a stranger attempts to break into a closed circle of people. Davies fails. The Matchseller and Ruth succeed. The triple nature of woman - wife, mother, whore - is one of the central themes in A Night Out, and A Slight Ache as well as Landscape~ The Homecoming, and The Lover. The complex relations between victim and tormentor recur almost like an obsession in The Dwarfs, as well as The Dumb Waiter, The Birthday Party and The Caretaker. The unbreakable stranglehold of power exercised through blood ties, position, passivity or sexuality is another theme running through these plays. The only theme unique to Pinter's radio work, as distinct from his stage work, also reflects the nature ofthe medium and that is the complete disintegration of a man's identity. This focus appears only in The Dwarfs where the radio convention ofinterior monologue, a form capable of fully evoking Len's hallucinations, is the core of the play. After the commercial failure of his first play, The Birthday...