Harold Pinter's Ear

Harold Pinter's Ear ERIC SALMON IN 1957, WHEN THE ROOM WAS FIRST PRODUCED at the Hampstead Theatre Club, and again in the following year when Pinter arrived (for a rather briefstay) in the West End with The Birthday Party, two things about his work stood out and attracted much critical comment: one was the atmosphere of half-hidden violence and indefinable menace; the other was the accuracy with which he had caught the exact cadence and texture of local London speech, several layers down into the sub-culture. The latter of these two qualities - though certainly real and considerable - proved to be a stumbling-block to critics, more especially, perhaps, to theatre critics (as distinct from literary critics whose task is easier, since they have a text before them and are not called upon for instant decision and opinion). The difficulty about that uncannily-well-observed naturalistic dialogue was that it tended to direct attention to the idea of the plays as direct, surface portraiture of the East End of London, more especially since it was by then known that Pinter himself had grown up there. That photograph, on the dust jacket of the first edition of his early plays, of Pinter leaning on the counter of an all-night coffee stall and listening attentively to the old man who served the coffee, represented a popular misconception of what the main thrust of his early work was to be. The fact that almost all of Pinter's early characters speak the most accurate Cockney that has ever been written for the English stage (compare it, for example, with Shaw's vaudeville-Cockney) was in one way misleading, for it was not the uneducated Cockneyness ofhis people that was their significant feature. On the other hand, that same Cockneyness provides us with one of the best examples we have of that curiously twentieth-century theatrical problem of establishing the right relationship between the 363 366 ERIC SALMON line phrases from two different characters, of that full flavour, both poetically and dramatically, of which Synge spoke. Yet it is based on phraseology as idiosyncratically characteristic of a certain well-defined and recognizable segment of the sub-culture as is Synge's. It abounds in Cockneyisms such as "That's a Black and Tan fact," "He left her in the pudding club," "Only your pong is left." For North American audiences (and, I suspect, for some British ones) this sort of colloquialism requires a glossary, yet its total effect is not in the least provincial or parochial - disturbingly otherwise, in fact. In this sense, it is exactly similar to and parallel with phrases like Synge's "since Tuesday was a week," "Where now will you meet the like of Daneen Sullivan knocked the eye from a peeler" and "I wouldn't give a thraneen for a lad hadn't a mighty , spirit in him and a gamy heart." Pinter's vision of the world, like Synge's, is essentially a poetic vision, not a documentary or sociological one, and though his plays are full of local documentary detail (the streets and districts of London, for example, in both The Caretaker (1960) and The Homecoming (1965)), yet he avoids entirely the dangers ofa dull literalism to which any naturalistic or near-naturalistic convention is prone. In this respect he is, with his predecessor John Whiting, the most significant of British mid-century dramatists, in that in his work and Whiting's the trend of the thirties and forties is reversed - a trend which had carried British drama, especially in the hands of its minor playwrights, too far along the road of pale imitation of the major proponents, at the end of the nineteenth century, of the naturalistic school. The progression from strictly photographic representation ofthe local patois to a deeper and more poetic use of language, both in individual plays and increasingly from the early work to the later, is achieved without damaging the credibility ofcharacters as such and without relaxing theatrical interest and tension (indeed, both qualities are increased by the progression of language). The progression itself is easy to demonstrate by examples, since all the plays are strewn with them. Take...