Pinter's Comic Play by Elin Diamond (review)

REVIEWS Elin Diamond. Pinter's Comic Play. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1985. Pp. 241. $29.50. Elin Diamond has written a straightforward and persuasive study of the many uses of comic devices in Pinter's dramatic structure. Free of jargon and the endless quest for thematizing the plays, her book directs us instead to fundamental questions of style and genre. Pinter's Comic Phy concentrates on the dramatic moment, how it works, how it develops inherited comedie conventions, how it affects, finally, the audience watching a play's narrative unfold. Diamond is thoroughly involved with the actuality of a Pinter play in performance. Her emphasis on the dramatic moment, enriched by her conscientious involvement with all that is up-to-date in Pinter scholarship, is, quite frankly, refreshing. Beginning with The Room, A Slight Ache, The Birthday Party, and TAe Caretaker, Diamond explores "posers and losers" in the context of comic situations that are immediately recognizable and identifiable by the audience. Her approach to these early plays goes a long way in distinguishing real puzzles from superficial ones. Since so much of the comedy happens in language, it is inevitable that patterns of dialogue command attention here. But Diamond knows that theater language must not be made a synonym for dialogue. She makes us aware, too, of the poignancy of the stage image. Aston's "junk" in The Caretaker, she observes, "provides a concrete metaphor for Davies's comic rigidity" (p. 79). In the same play Davies becomes "Pinter's revision of the traditional alazon" (p. 80), carefully manipulated by the playwright's use of dialogue and stage image to achieve his most telling effects. By Unking these early plays to traditional comic modes, Diamond shows us Pinter's understanding of the stage comedy he has so subtly transformed. The central chapter of the book has to do with parody, always a tricky business in the theater. In this chapter Diamond uses The Lover, The Dumb Waiter, The Collection, and The Homecoming, probably Pinter's most successful play, to illustrate her argument. Acknowledging her indebtedness to Andrew Kennedy in Six Dramatists in Search of a Language, she goes much further in detailing the elements of parodie structure to be found in these plays. This is Diamond's strongest chapter, and it is reassuring to see her incorporating her earlier studies of Pinter's use of parody in a much wider context: Parodying the family drama, The Homecoming scourges traditional playgoing instincts: all possible motives are unverifiable, all displays of emotion erratic and contradictory. The undercutting game, which we understand and laugh at, also suffers mutation, becoming a past norm that present revelations break down or recast. In The Homecoming, as in the other parody plays, Pinter shocks us into laughter, then defies us to rationalize what we are laughing at (p. 158) Any analysis of comedy in Pinter, however, needs to convince us 182 Reviews183 that the more mature plays—Old Times, No Man's Land, and Betrayal— can also bear scrutiny from a similar angle. Diamond's study, in a sense, hinges on her ability to specify that which is "more obliquely comic" in these works. Her close reading of the dramatic action in all three of these plays is admirably pointed toward this goal without at the same time undermining other resonances we might be able to find in these scenes. "Playing on the Past," the title of this chapter, shows us that Pinter plays on his own dramatic past as well as on the past of other playwrights. Throughout her study Diamond has made pointed allusions to Noel Coward, T. S. Eliot, the Restoration dramatists, and American movies. In this chapter the allusive texture comes into sharper relief. Time remembered becomes stage time remembered, adding a new twist to the parodie techniques her study has previously acknowledged. Pinter's Comic Play is very valuable in examining what happens in Pinter up to Betrayal. The approach Diamond takes also can make considerable sense when applied to Victoria Station and, to a lesser extent, Family Voices, two recent works the author briefly addresses in her closing comments. A Kind of Alaska, is, however, another matter, as is One...