Pinter: disturbing genius

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33741, 14 January 1975, Page 4

Pinter: disturbing genius

(By

HAROLD HOBSON,

drama critic of,tht"'Sunday Times." London.)

Sixteen years ago Harold Pinter was unknown — a penniless (actor. Today his work ■has been translated into ia dozen languages, has been produced in many countries and has been honoured with many awards.

One of the latest of these is a prize, worth about $2300, given to him by Austria’s Ministry of Education and Art. The very high international standing of this award is evident from the quality of previous winners, who. include Eugene lonesco, Vaclav Havel and W. H. Auden.

Mr Pinter is quiet, jpoised, composed, very well dressed, but not ostentatiously so, and loves to talk about cricket — England’s national game.

He came into the British theatre in the great creative flowering of the 1950 s that introduced into the drama people such as the dramatist John Arden and directors such as Peter Brook, Anthony Page and Lindsay Anderson. Yet he had a different background from these.

Whereas they came from Oxford and Cambridge Universities and the great public schools, Pinter was the son of a Jewish tailor in the London suburb of Hackney and went to a local grammar school. All have been, and still are, enormously successful, and have made the English theatre famous throughout the world. Pinter’s plays deal with tramps and criminals, hired murderers, slums and poverty, “the nameless terror that flieth by night,” and “the. pestilence that walketh at noonday.” He does this with wit; but also with a mysterious, sinister mastery outside the range of any other contemporary dramatist. In his work he is the most disturbing and unsettling of playwrights—but in his life he is the most contented, poised and calm.

Pinter’s strength as an actor lies in his understanding of an esoteric text. This, if one considers the often enigmatic nature of his own work, is not surprising. Nevertheless it is not always the case that a man who is ar home in mysteries can make clear the mysteries of others.

With Pinter it is particularly remarkable that he c hould be able to do this. In his plays he is content to leave both for himself and for his audiences ereat expanses of uncertainty. Pinter works on 'he same sunnosition as Marguerite Duras, for whom he has vreat admiration — namelv. that the knowledge of the dramatist about his characters is limited. Yet when he reads aloud an arcane text one has the feeling of absolute claritv, of a bright illumination, of the disnersal of ■■'oubt and uncertainty-. Yet. though Pinter’s knowledge of his characters, by definition from the aesthetic theory that is at the foundation of his work, is limited, what there is of it is exact. His early audiences could make little or nothing of nlays such as "The Room.” which he wrote for students at Bristol University, nor of "The Birthdav Party,” nor even of "The Caretaker,” which in 1960 was his first great success. “The Caretaker” played for several hundred consecutive performances and was highly praised, yet Pinter said in a private letter that no more than a single critic had understood it. What he meant by this was that his own understanding of “The Caretaker” was not something vague and obscure which could accommodate itself to various critical interpretations, but that it was sharp and clear and definite.

When someone described (Aston, the slow-thinking, inexorable man in “The Caretaker” whose brain has been dulled by an operation, as “implacable,” Pinter exclaimed: “That is it. That is the exact word.” There are in Pinter’s plays terror, unease, perversion, all of them in themselves impalpable things. But to Pinter they are concrete realities, of which his grasp is firm and unwavering.

What one gathers from his work is an underlying (feeling that in the organisation of the world there is somewhere a defect, something that does not quite fit, a warping in the mechanism that renders everything false. And this feeling of a strangeness at the heart of things is con-; veyed, not as in Maeter-i linck for example, by cloudy symbolic phrases but by broken ends of conversation that exactly reproduce the tone and rhythm of ordinary life. It is with apparent banalities that Pinter creates terror and mystery. In his later work it is by the same means that he creates and implies love. At the end of “Landscape” he says no more than “Oh, my true love”; yet in this simple phrase he calls up a tide of passion that sweeps one off one’s feet.

Pinter is a director as well as a dramatist. He is perhaps the only director who has ever succeeded in making James Joyce’s enigmatic “Exiles” a viable theatrical experience. He has also written very successfully for television and directed films, among them his own “Caretaker.” He adapted L. P. Hartley’s “The Go-Between” for the screen.

But his main work is for the theatre, where he is steadily consolidating his reputation as Britain’s most important and idiosyncratic dramatist.