The Basement: Harold Pinter on BBC-TV

The Basement: Harold Pinter on BBC-TV CHRISTOPHER C. HUDGINS In 1955, Harold Pinter wrote to a friend: "Of course I recognise forms and employ them, or, rather, go to meet them - a continuous voyage, and my seed within them, they expand or snap. There is no such thing as a static mode of expression. There is no form which does not take alteration with one artist's approach ."! Pinter's work does seem always to be stretching formal boundaries, expanding the possibilities of theater, radio, film, and, yes, even television. Admittedly, this stretching offormal boundaries occasionally has caused some confusion for critics and audiences. Such expansion of possibilities often springs from various genres influencing one another, violating audience expectations. Pinter's television plays are wonderful examples of cross-media fertilization, for he both brings to the television studio one of the most highly regarded theatrical talents of this century and takes back to the theater much of what he learns from writing scripts for the small screen. The most important asset that Pinter grasps from his work in television is the camera's ability, in the right hands and with the right script, delicately to suggest subjective perception, fantasy and memory. He gradually begins to structure his television plays to take advantage of the ease with which the camera, and editing, can focus or suddenly shift an audience's attention. Pinter's comments while making the film version of The Caretaker emphasize the importance of such cross-media activity. The play, he says, was" 'opened out' in the sense that things I'd yearned to do, without knowing it, in writing for the stage, crystallised when I came to think about it as a film. Until then I didn't know that I wanted to do them because I'd accepted the limitations of the stage.,,2 From Pinter's perspective, those limitations include the theater's near inability to portray directly mental processes, particular points of view or perspectives, or the relationship ofthe play's immediate concern or focus to the larger world surrounding it. Martin Esslin has accurately noted that in general, Pinter's language in the 72 CHRISTOPHER C. HUDGINS theatrical works illuminates the mental processes that lie beneath the surface.3 But in the mature work, Pinter attempts a new type of"realistic expressionism," the blending of a dramatically presented, complex interior life with a complex exterior, "surface" action. As Lois G. Gordon observes, Pinter attempts in dramatic form what James Joyce and Virginia Woolfaccomplished in the novel years ago, the theatrical equivalent of the interior monologue.4 The technique allows him to shift in and out of the minds of his characters on stage, changing his dramatic focus, subtly, without signposts telling us when we are in the character's mind and when we are seeing a more objective reality. The result is an innovative dramatic form which shows us a character's perspective, his or her fantasies and memories, and which contrasts these perceptions of the individual character with the reality we see around that character. In Pinter's hands, this depiction of an interior reality works far more pleasingly, or less artificially, than similar attempts by O'Neill, Pirandello, Miller, and so on. The theatrical interior monologue evolves through Pinter's work in television, and the impact is clear in shorter theater pieces like Landscape (1968), Silence (1969), and Night (1969), and, more importantly, in the full-length works Old Times (1971), No Man's Land (1975), and even Betrayal (1978).5 After the April 1960 production of The Caretaker, Pinter did not complete another play originally written for the theater until the March 1965 production of The Homecoming. During this five-year period, he wrote several sketches and The Dwarfs (1960) for radio; he completed four television plays, Night School (1960), The Collection (1961), The Lover (1963) and Tea Party (1965); and he wrote three filmscripts, The Servant (1963), The Compartment (1963), and The Pumpkin Eater (1965). He eventually adapted all of the television plays for theatrical production, as he did the radio play, The Dwarfs. During the same period, he adapted The Caretaker for a film version (1962). The Compartment...