Pinter's Night: A Stroll Down Memory Lane

Pinter's Night: A Stroll Down Memory Lane THOMAS P. ADLER • AS ONE CRITIC REMINDS US in a recent article, there is a readily noticeable "change of emphasis" in the tone and techniques of the plays which Harold Pinter has written after The Homecoming (1965).1 And although several commentators have analyzed Pinter's better known stage works from this post-Homecoming period - Landscape (1968), Silence (1969), and Old Times (1971)2 -, there has been practically no attention directed towards the brief dramatic sketch entitled "Night," which was performed in England in 1969 as part of an evening of short plays under the collective title Mixed Doubles, and is published along with Landscape and Silence. Perhaps its brevity (only seven pages) has disarmed some critics. Yet it is interesting and important not only as "a coda" to the situation in Landscape3 and as a prelude to the dramaturgy and themes of Old Times, but primarily in and for itself as a very compressed, intense, and poetic short drama that expresses a point of view very atypical for its playwright. For this is perhaps the only time in the whole range of Pinter's dramatic output that we find portrayed a completely satisfactory and mutually satisfying relationship between a husband and wife. True, there are either temporary or permanent accommodations or standoffs reached by husbands and wives in other Pinter plays. Between, for example, Richard and Sarah in The Lover (1963), who can sustain their marriage only through the game wherein Richard plays his wife's lover while Sarah plays her husband's mistress. Or between Beth and Duff in Landscape, where Beth exists in her own private world of romantic memories that the more brutish Duff is totally excluded from (he, the stage direction tells us, "does not appear to hear her voice," nor she his)4 and therefore cannot destroy. Or in Old Times between Kate and Deeley 461 462 THOMAS P. ADLER before Anna arrives - or comes to consciousness if, as seems quite likely, she has been with them all the while. But "Night" is Pinter's only unequivocal celebration so far of married love.5 A Man and a Woman - unlike Pinter's other characters they bear no more specific names than that, since they are finally, at least on one level, embodiments of the masculine and feminine principles - are sitting drinking coffee before bed. They are "in their forties,"6 the autumn of their lives, reminiscing about the night when they first met. But the passage of time can erode memory, or confuse it, or even allow one to formulate "memories" of something that perhaps never even happened, but was only wished for in one's reveries. As Pinter himselfsuggests: "The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend to remember." Anna in Old Times echoes this intuition of the author's: "There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened. There are things I remember which may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place."7 The landscape of memory is fraught with infinite possibilities which can become subjective truths, truths more true than those of objective reality. And so, as is true in Old Times as well, there are some major discrepancies between the Man's and the Woman's memories of their first meeting - discrepancies which the playwright strategically employs to cast the audience in one of its favorite roles as amateur sleuth. Though both of them agree that they first met at a party "given by the Doughtys," the Man, who admits to having known both the Doughtys previously, claims that the Woman also knew Mr. Doughty before, whereas she recalls only that he had known Doughty's wife, who "seemed to love" him: "She looked at you dearly, as if to say you were her dear" (p. 58). The husband remembers that after the party they walked on a bridge and stopped to look at the river; then he put his "hand under [her] coat ... on the small of [her] waist," and then "undid [her] brassiere" and caressed her breasts (pp. 55, 59). But the wife remembers...