Pancakes and Soap Suds: A Study of Childishness in Pinter's Plays

Pancakes and Soap Suds: A Study of Childishness in Pinter's Plays ELLEN F. SCHIFF • HAROLD PINTER'S CHARACTERS frequently resemble children in the manner in which he presents them to us, in their behavior, which is either distinctly juvenile or manifests the conditioning associated with childhood, and in the way in which we react to them. They almost always exist in a room, threatened by imminent expulsion. The security they derive from their rooms and their reluctance to be dispossessed find a parallel in the state of irresponsible well-being of the unborn child and in his instinctive protest when forced by life to trade the protection of his private world for the insecurity of whatever lies beyond. In response to Kenneth Tynan's question about what his characters feared, Pinter explained, ~'Obviously they are scared of what is outside the room. Outside the room there is a world bearing upon them which is frightening."l In confining his dramatic action to events taking place exclusively or primarily in one room, Pinter accomplishes several striking effects. One of these is the creation of history-less characters. Like a teacher entering a classroom for the first time, audiences simply find the actors on stage when the curtain goes up. The tantalizing ambiguities that surround Pinter's people derive not so much from the, modicum of information concerning where and what they have been before we meet them, as from the desultory manner in which they tell probably apocryphal stories about their pasts, and from our difficulty in reconciling what they tell us with what they seem to do and to be. Their stories are often blurted out with an urgency which belies their lack of suitability to the situation at hand. In The Homecoming, Lenny, having made a promising start in the seduction of Ruth, abruptly veers off into a tale of brutality. Goldberg, just introduced to the man he's come to terrorize in The Birthday Party, launches into an account of the pure days of childhood. 91 92 ELLEN F. SCHIFF Pinter confronts us with physically mature characters whose very age makes reasonable the assumption that they have had experiences that should reflect in their behavior on stage, but who appear to act in spite of those experiences. Because of the playwright's economy in endowing his people with relevant histories, because of his relentless insistence upon the present, they appear to audiences very much like little children who literally have lirr.ited histories and who have yet to acquire judgment in assessing and revealing what has happened to them. The stories that the characters contrive in dialogue peppered with reminiscences make little sense to audiences who seek insight into what these people were or are right now. What is of capital importance, however, is that the anecdotes and remembrances make sense to the characters, who are governed by exactly the same motivation that prompts a first-grader to interrupt his class with the pressing announcement of some detail that has no apparent pertinence to the subject at hand. Of prime importance is the need to speak one's mind at that moment and the inability either to discern or to control the fitness of one's contribution to the context. In the same way that a child's lack of discrimination in drawing upon past experience hardly makes him less appealing, Pinter feels that "a character on the stage who can present no convincing argument or information as to his past experience, his present behaviour of his aspirations, nor give a comprehensive analysis of his motives is as legitimate and as worthy of attention as one who, alarmingly, can do all these things.,,2 In plays built of reactions rather than motivations, he invites attention to what his characters do, only to thwart both our understanding and theirs of why they do it. It is as useless to try to find logic in the questions with which McCann and Goldberg scourge Stanley as it is to seek sense in the noises and faces that equally determined adults standing over a baby carriage make at its denizen. The words and sounds in both cases take on a meaning...