Game Playing in Three by Pinter

Game Playing in Three by Pinter LORRAINE HALL BURGHARDT • THE DRAMA OF PINTER, because of the elusiveness of meaning and the refusal of the dramatist to explicate his own work, tends to cry out for interpretation, though such interpretation may, in the long run, do more to rend the play than to render it comprehensible. The difficulty for many critics in assessing meaning and evaluating techniques can be summed up by Schechner's observations that Pinter leaves the audience (and the critic) "to supply whatever conceptual framework it can, because no single rational frame will answer all the questions."l Yet it is precisely this single frame which critics have sought and found in Pinter's use of language, non-language, elaborate ritualism, Freudianism, and even confusion.2 Yet all these approaches are not as diverse as they may initially appear; many ofthese theories are built on a concept which has remained unarticulated. I postulate that the "games people play," the concept of game playing, is that frame which serves as a key to the meaning of Pinter plays and which can be elaborated upon extensively. This approach, while speculative , is all the more useful because it finds an explanation where none is proferred by the dramatist, because of the immediacy of its impact on an audience, and because of its uncanny adherence to many of the basic tenets of Absurdism. While the aims of the Absurdist movement and the intentions of its practitioners are protean in their diversity, a representative sampling of definitions demonstrates the existence of common concerns. For example, Esslin believes that the role of a dramatist such as Pinter is to "merely present, in anxiety or with derision, an individual human being's intuition of the ultimate realities as he experiences them: the fruits of one man's descent into the depths of his personality, his dreams, his fantasies~ his 377 378 LORRAINE HALL BURGHARDT nightmares."3 This emphasis on fantasy is reiterated in Ionesco's statement that "Fantasy is revealing; it is a method of cognition: everything that is imagined is true; nothing is true if it is not imagined."4 Pinter, in a rare statement, stresses the hiatus between the actions of characters and the dialogue they speak: So often, below the word spoken, is the thing known and unspoken. My characters tell me so much and no more, with reference to their experience, their aspirations, their motives, their history. Between my lack of biographical data about them and the ambiguity ofwhat they say there lies a territory which is not only worthy of exploration but which it is compulsory to explore.... it's out of these attributes that a language arises. A language, I repeat, where, underneath what is said, another thing is being said.5 The similarity' of this view, in particular, to the recent findings of psychologists and ethologists on the importance of nonverbal communication in everyday human behavior is striking.6 What these, and many other definitions, have in common is the emphasis on fantasy as it provides a bridge between the inner motivation and the surface action. Game playing, because of its components of fantasy, inner logic, the dislocation of time, and because of its mythic, ritualistic formation helps to explicate this territory. The very word "play" ofcourse suggests the entire area ofthe theatre. Groos stresses that art arises from the play instinct found in all animals,7 a statement which mirrors Aristotle's idea about the origins of tragedy as instinctive and imitative. John Huizinga's Homo Ludens goes so far as to contend that play, which is the central driving force in the formation of societies and cultures, not only transmits the current ethos but also provides for variations. So if we are looking for a comprehensive base on which to rest Pinter's plays, this approach is quite in keeping with the immediacy of his theater. Ritual, the key characteristic of the concept, consists of events which are not ordered by logic and actions which cannot be expressed in words, surely two characteristics of many Absurdist plays. What results is a concrete expression consisting of a series of apparently unconnected symbols. Consider, for example, how Christian...