Messages from Pinter

MESSAGES FROM PINTER EVERYBODY RECOGNIZES THAT MODERN THEATER IS PUNY, compared to the real thing of the past; it presents a puny species of human who has no incentive for character development and no notion of what he exists for. But in the hands of a genuine artist this negativeseeming substance can be used, if _not to embody any great principles, at least to set loose all the big questions, and the English playwright , Harold Pinter, is one of the most skillful at doing so. There is no need to make more of his material than he. does, and no reason why he should ever run out of it. He has so far two main types of subject matter: one, the little allegory about life, death, and cosmic concepts, the other, the under': currents and drives in huma~ relationships. The latter is no doubt his more important one, though the allegory in the style of the absurd is a neat form deftly handled. I will try here to interpret briefly the two short allegories, The Dumbwaiter and The Room~ and then draw out some of the themes in the human-relationships plays. In this discussion I omit Pinter's first play, The Birthday Party~ which does not fit into either of the above types, but is instead an ingenious and horrifying revelation of gang depravity and torture going on before the unsuspecting eyes of the innocent and ignorant. The Dumbwaiter-also in terms of gangsters, though figuratively used-presents two thugs inside a small, bare room where they are trying to pass the time while waiting to kill someone, having been sent here by their immediate superior to do this "job." They don't know the purpose of their assignment, where it fits in the scheme of things, what the big-time deal is, what anybody is getting out o~ it. They are simply two hired thugs working for a big underworld organization. They follow instructions. They exist in a void as if they had been placed there blindfolded and told not to ask questions. -This isolation from aim sounds familiar enough, since we have had it before in modern symbolism, the theater of the absurd. Pinter is surely indebted to Beckett in this concept, but we should find nothing wrong with that as long as he has his unique version of it.. No writer can be independent of the sty~es and trends dominant in his own time. The question that is brought up here is the keynote of our age, and an artist with any awareness of his environment cannot avoid striking that keynote or availing himself of the devices others have found· for doing so. At any rate, these two men are the same two men who were· waiting for Godot. This room, like. that 1 2 MODERN DRAMA May desert, is without location in· the universe. They know nothing of their connection with motives or goals. They are kept in the dark about everything. Their slice of life is as if cut out of context so that they know neither the origin nor the results of anything they do. In short, it is the modern artist's view of what our life is, intercepted from whatever knowledge of purpose and meaning is needed to give direction to our functioning, stranded be,tween the source and the destination, with nothing certain but the forced necessity of action-and this action, to our boredom and disgust, consists largely of dynamic waiting in armed readiness for the enemy to appear. Who that enemy will be and why he will manifest as an enemy is anybody's guess, and really none of our business, since all that is decided somewhere else. But certainly life is like that. We are thugs (who wouldn't admit it by now from our blunt international interferences?), but our only alternative is to wait and be overcome by the opposing gangsters. Meanwhile, in this impersonal room the two men carryon the most nonsensical conversation about the tiniest trivialities of the moment,. the kind of things that most of life truly consists of while the big things are in suspension. In the midst of this they...