Tonight:
4°c
I measure out my entire theatre-going life in terms of Harold Pinter. For I owe my passion for the stage and the enthralling, emotional impact it has had upon me to the spell Pinter's plays began to cast upon me when I was just into my teens.
At the time I knew theatres as places where I was irritated by pantomimes, bemused by Agatha Christie's dim thrillers and bored out of my mind by a school trip to see The Two Gentlemen of Verona at Stratford-upon-Avon. I guessed there could be, must be something more to the stage than this dire exposure to theatrics. Then one evening in 1958 they put Pinter's The Birthday Party on television and everything changed in 90 minutes.
I became stage-struck - thanks to the box. I ran away from real life for ever and plunged myself into the easier alternative of vicarious living with plays and players. So my valediction to Pinter, whom I hardly knew personally, requires me to register an indelible sense of gratitude to him.
That TV version of The Birthday Party was broadcast not long after the play's famous premiere at the Lyric Hammersmith. It ran for just a week and precipitated an outburst of bemused contempt from newspaper critics who required safe plays by English gentlemen, in which everything was as clear as rain and hardly more interesting. The one man who appreciated and loved it - Harold Hobson, The Sunday Times's critic - was Pinter's polar opposite: Christian, conservative, royalist, obsessively homophobic and a wild supporter of Britain's then rigid stage censorship.
When I saw The Birthday Party I knew it was considered controversial and strange. Still I felt myself riveted by its peculiarities. What exactly was going on? Why was Stanley, the seaside pianist on whom his landlady oddly doted, tormented and terrorised by the Irishman and Jew who arrived one evening and dragged him away the next morning? I did not mind that Pinter left us in the dark. I believed in his freshly defined and refined, Kafkaesque vision of life, with its inexplicable fears and violence.
Pinter, an exceptionally bright child, born at the start of that "low, dishonest decade", the 1930s, was surely permeated by a sense of a world possessed by war, genocide and enduring anti-Semitism. He was akin to Beckett in his refusal to create explicable characters about whom everything is eventually discovered and revealed. Pinter's people remain as inscrutable and unknowable as Enigma codes. His plays, from those thrilling, early one-acters The Room and The Dumb Waiter and his master-works The Caretaker, No Man's Land and Old Times to the later, horrifying political plays, Mountain Language and One for the Road, are consumed by existential anxiety and power-struggles, by sexual ploys and the menace of intruding visitors.
My appreciation of Pinter, though, has an unusual element to it. I am always struck by the way his plays begin naturalistically, inhabiting a place suspended between reality and dream. His beautiful, poetic one-acters Landscape, Silence and Inner Voices are all imbued with this quality. Life, you might say of the situation in No Man's Land, where Spooner changes or suspends his identity and adopts a new persona after spending a night in the home of the incipiently senile Hirst, just doesn't happen like that. A similar complaint could be made of his most intriguing puzzle play, Old Times, in which Kate and her husband Deeley prepare to welcome her long-lost best friend Anna to their home. Yet as the couple talk about Anna's forthcoming visit she already seems to be there, standing at the window, looking out. Suddenly Anna turns and joins in the conversation, as if she had been there all the time.
Are dream and reality, together with memory, that ever treacherous element in Pinter plays, all entwined? I find myself entranced by Pinter's triumph of uncertainty, fused with enigma and naturalism shading into dream. In his late play Celebration, a satire on the greedy, materialistic 1990s, a waiter strangely announces: "My grandfather introduced me to the mystery of life and I'm still in the middle of it." With this, dear, departed Harold Pinter shows us how life's mysteries remain just beyond our grasp.
