Pinter's Homecoming on Celluloid

Pinter's Homecoming on Celluloid ENOCH BRATER • WORKING FROM A SCENARIO especially adapted for the occasion by Harold Pinter and securely anchored in the theme and movement of the stage play, Peter Hall's 116-minute production of The Homecomingl was one ofa series ofeight cinematic ventures undertaken by Ely Landau's American Film Theatre in 1973-74. Pinter's screenplay demonstrates the writer's changing concept of the same characters and the same situation with which his imagination is working, an attempt to "wring the play's neck once more" before the elusive protagonists "withdraw into the shadOWS ."2 In the process we witness not so much a shift in meaning or value as a reconsideration of mood and theatrical effects, the curious disconnection of similitudes in a playwright's changing sense of a work's shape and validity as he translates from one medium into another: On the stage one of the challenges that faces a director, a writer and the actors is how to focus the attention of the audience, how to bend the focus, how to insist that the focus of the audience goes in one specific direction when there are so many other things to look at on the stage. With a film the audience must attend only to the particular image you're showing them. They have no chance to do anything else.3 Pinter also made his debut as film director in the American Film Theatre by bringing Simon Gray's Butley to life on the screen, are-interpretation of the same project he had presented on the London stage two years before. "The play Butley was written Jor the stage," he told one interviewer , "The film Butley was conceived for the screen. I was concerned with expressing the work in terms of film and I was dealing with a work which in fact dictated itself in terms of how you look at it."4 The same 443 444 ENOCH BRATER can be said ofPinter's cinematic collaboration on his own play with director Peter Hall. By comparing The Homecoming written for the stage with The Homecoming conceived for the screen, in each medium the work achieves a higher level of complexity and unpredictability. Perhaps the single most distinctive feature of the scenario for The Homecoming is the way in which Pinter deliberately violates the claustrophobic atmosphere of his original one-room set. We see Ruth and Teddy drive up to an old North London house in a taxi, characters ascend and descend the bottom of a staircase now in full view, we observe the family having lunch in Max's meticulously appointed kitchen, and in Act One the camera accompanies Ruth as she leaves by the front door and walks down the street to take a breath of fresh night air. The result is a general opening up of the closed box-set Pinter had in mind for the original London production at the Aldwych. Pinter's scenario for The Homecoming totally transforms the specifications for his original mise en scene. He told designer John Bury, who set the stage for the Royal Shakespeare Company production in 1965, that he needed a room with an area not in full sightline: neither the window that looked out on the door nor the bottom of the staircase was to be shown. "The non-use of the door," Bury later remarked, "made the door far more real than ifyou had a stage door. The moment you get a stage door, which clunks and bangs, it doesn't work."5 The large area of the Aldwych stage was stripped to absolute essentials so that "a movement means the thing it ought to mean." Avoiding any kind of naturalistic set "that tries to kid the audience that they're not in a theater," Hall wrote a note to Bury indicating "we will have nothing on the stage except what is necessary." In this way "the necessary shape" of Pinter's set spoke far more eloquently: "wetook everything away except a few pieces offurniture."6 On stage The Homecoming is a peculiar interaction ofreal and surreal elements:7 we hear the opening and closing of doors we cannot...