Pinter's Progress

Pinter's Progress NOEL KING Austin Quigley concluded his recent study The Pinter Problem with this observation: "it is by no means uncommon to find in responses to his recent work the same elements of uncertainty that characterized the early criticism. The time is long overdue for Pinter criticism to move beyond the problems that have dominated the field since the first appearance of Pinter's work on the London stage.'" Quigley's solution in part is to apply some aspects of current work in linguistics to a reading of the plays, whereas Lucina Gabbard in her recent analysis The Dream Structure of Pinter's Plays: A Psychoanalytic Approach' applies aspects of Freud's theories to a reading of the plays. In this article, I shall suggest that a further way of reading Pinter resides simply in noticing the extent to which he has worked in the various media (theatre, film, television, prose, poetry) in various capacities (writer, actor, director) and in this context trying to see the stage plays as only one part of an overall body of work. The only Pinter writings to have remained solely in the medium ofthe theatre are the short works The Room, The Dumb Waiter, Silence, and the last two plays, No Man's Land and Betrayal. Of the other writings, The Dwatfs came from an abandoned novel, first for radio and later for the stage; A Slight Ache and A Night Out moved from radio to stage to film; Monologue was written for television; and Old Times has been recorded by B.B.C. T.V. Here it is worth recalling that it was Pinter'S television work which first found him a large audience, the people who later filled the West End theatres, and further, that since 1965 Pinter has involved himself increasingly with film work. In those fifteen years he has written two short plays and three longer plays (two ofwhich developed from a much shorter piece), and during that same period his television plays, screenplays and adaptations of some of his stage plays include Tea Party, The Basement, The Quiller Memorandum, Accident, The Go-Between, The Birthday Party, The Homecoming, Remembrance ofThings Past, The Last Tycoon, Langrishe, Go Down (which he directed and acted in for television), and his film direction of Butley. Pinter's Progress 251 passive role of listener quickly becomes a besieged position. To talk is to fill the void and to get in first. Physical dominance still is linked to verbal dominance, but in a subtly altered manner. While Martin Esslin" rightly has suggested that in Pinter's early work possession of a more elaborate word or phrase led to physical dominance, it is also true that uncertainty about the word or phrase meant that the threat of physical aggression accompanied the hesitant utterances . It was a readiness to support verbal vulnerability with physical force. A quick look at the characters in Pinter's recent plays shows that these kinds of confrontations can no longer occur. In Old Times, there are two women and a man; in Betrayal, two civilised, sophisticated male friends and a woman; in No Man's Land, Gielgud and Richardson at no point seemed able to extend linguistic jousting into physical combat. The one character who seems able to extend verbal violence into physical action is Briggs (Terence Rigby), and he for the most part dutifully obeys orders. When Foster asks, "Why don't I kick his head off and have done with it?"" , he does not persuade us that he could begin to literalize his threat. No Man's Land unites three dominant Pinter themes: ambiguity of sexual status, competitive reminiscence, and a general interrogation of language (to the point that one might see the four characters as representing four different kinds of language). Very early in the play, Spooner remarks to Hirst, "All we have left is the English language. Can it be salvaged?"'3 From this point forward, the play is a maze of allusion and parody. The four characters are named after Edwardian cricketers, although Spooner also carries an obvious allusion to linguistic misuse. Echoes of Conrad's "Youth," Beckett, Eliot, Housman, even Emily Dickinson are to...