Pinter Refuses To Explain

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31341, 11 April 1967, Page 7

Pinter Refuses To Explain

By

Simon Kavanaugh

In the relationship between Harold Pinter and the critics the laurels for consistency must go to the playwright Nine years ago when his play “The Birthday Party” was staged in Landon the critics, almost without exception, pulled the plug on him. Accusing him of obscurity and meaninglessness, they dismissed him as an overreaching, would-be Beckett In the wake of the first wave of kitchen sink, angry young men, the sheer conventional

unconventionality of his background was enough in itself to condemn him. The son of a Jewish tailor from London's East End, a repertory actor, dishwasher, waiter, caretaker and Oxford street hawker, he might have been created by John Osborne.

Of "The Birthday Party” “The Times,” for example, said: “The first act sounds an off-beat note of madness; in the second the note has risen to a sort of delirium; and the third act studiously refrains from the slightest hint of what the other two may have been about.”

This attitude was not exceptional.

STAYED SILENT In the face of this concerted drubbing 27-year-old Pinter maintained a bland dignity which he could hardly have been feeling, and refused to explain: “I am not going to make a statement about what it is about; I want the people who see it to decide for themselves.” Since then Pinter has continued to refuse to explain, leaving his audiences to decide for themselves. Earnest inquirers have tried to draw him out, but the best any of them has achieved is a straightfaced resume of the action as they themselves have seen it No interpretation. No clue to the symbolism, if symbolism there is. Indeed, Pinter has said that he would not know a symbol if he saw one. In the meantime, however, the attitude towards Pinter of the critics, the public and the establishment both social and theatrical, has undergone a complete about-face. WITHOUT PEER Mr Harold Pinter, Commander of the British Empire, first gentleman of British playwrights, umpteen-times award-winner, can now survey from his swank home in Regent’s Park a world in which he is without peer as a dramatist of stage, screen and telly. Paris fawns on him, credit-

ing him with having revived the French theatre. On Broadway his “The Homecoming” successfully defies the tide running against serious drama. When the 8.8. C. want a new TV play for the 12-nation “Largest Theatre In The ■World” it is to Harold Pinter that, they turn. Yet Harold Pinter has gone on writing plays every bit as obscure as “The Birthday Party" and not relenting one whit his determination to offer no explanation. The change has not come from Pinter; it has come from the other side. Why? It is tempting to think that Pinter has been clever enough to leave the public and the critics to rationalise his irrationality, knowing that the theories so evolved will be defended to the death by their authors. In the field of the graphic and plastic arts the device is not unknown. What is certain is that since the days of St. John the Divine and Nostradamus, few authors have generated so much popular speculation over what they are getting at as Harold Pinter has done. IMPLICATIONS

Being largely staccato banalities and the repetitious trivia of everyday small talk, his lines qua lines offer little for the theorisers. So with a sort of goon logic, they have been driven to finding portent in his non-lines. It is what he does not write, the pauses, the dot and dashes (Pinter prefers the former) that are pregnant with menace. Serious critics have written that once they learned to suspend logic, they could revel enjoyably in Pinter’s illogicalities which sounds rather like the sort of refuge taken by art critics who, having failed to find representation or symbol in a painter’s work, rhapsodise over his daring chromatic chaos. Yet it would be cheap, and incidentally quite unfair to Pinter, to explain him away as a successfully devious showman. It is true that, out of context, Pinter’s dialogue comes near to gibberish; it is just as true that read in the cold light of day, it is compounded of repetitious banalities and the vapid cliches of humdrum lives. Heard in the theatre, even on the small screen, in the atmosphere conceived by Pinter and realised by a producer of the stature of, say, Peter Hall, there is no blinking the aura of menace that it generates. Part of the fascination of Pinter, a large part, is that infuriatingly he never identifies the menace. One critic has written that he “creates a hunger in the spectator”; another has said that “the audience leaves at the end like people who have been called away in the middle of a Hitchcock thriller.” At the same time, the Pin-

ter audience knows, even if only half articulately, that were the situations resolved, the menace revealed in all its enormity and the ends neatly tied, the inexplicable magic of Harold Pinter would disappear. It is reasonable to assume that Harold Pinter is as aware of this as anyone; but that in no way diminishes his skill any more than economy of style diminishes a painter’s stature. It is in film-scripting—" The Servant,” “The Accident,” “The Quiller Memorandum”

f —that his economy iii a 1 more comprehensible form [ becomes apparent. . Indeed, one critic, after . seeing “The Quiller Memor- [ andum,” wrote in a burst of admitted revelation: “One . begins to see the Pinter • world not as a private place but as the same one other i writers describe, with more left out.” It could be that Harold Pinter, the tailor’s son from East London, will take his place in the theatre’s history not for what he wrote, but for what he left out.