Lakhasly

Unpacking the Pinteresque in
The Dumb Waiter and Beyond
Marc E. Shaw
"Lady, if I have to tell you, you'll never know."
-- Louis Armstrong, when a reporter asked him to define jazz.1
During an interview with Lawrence Bensky in 1966, Harold Pinter
heard the word Pinteresque: “That word!” Pinter exclaimed, “These
damn words and that word Pinteresque particularly -- I don’t know
what they’re bloody well talking about! I think it’s a great burden for
me to carry, and for other writers to carry” (34).
A term weighed down with years of baggage deserves to be
critically unpacked, and Pinteresque is no exception. The word itself
appeared within a few years of Pinter’s rise to prominence in the early
1960s, as reviewers attempted to name and explain what Pinter does in
his early “room plays:” The Room (1959), The Birthday Party (1959),
The Dumb Waiter (1960), and The Caretaker (1960).2
One review in
The Daily Telegraph in 1963 was headlined “Pinter at his most
Pinteresque.” Describing the lesser-known The Dwarfs (1962), the
review humorously emphasized the unique character of a Pinter
evening: “pintation at its most pinticular,” and “directed pinteresquely
by the author” (qtd in Zarhy-Levo 36).
But such morphological license did not put everyone in good
humor. For example, in 1971, Herman T. Schroll surveyed the first ten
years of Pinter reviews and criticism, declaring the playwright
“trapped” by “facets of the Pinter fashion” -- the tendency to
pigeonhole Pinter by introducing reductive terms. Schroll charts the
main labels in that initial trajectory: “from menace to realism and
absurd, to hyper-realism, and finally to Pinterism.” However,
according to Schroll, “‘development’ in the criticism could be no more
than an illusion since each term represented an attempt to define
categorically something impossible to define” (76-7).
As “impossible” or weighty as Pinteresque may or may not
be, not all critics agree that the word itself constitutes a burden for
Pinter or other writers. On the contrary, Yael Zarhy-Levo sees
Pinteresque as a boost for Pinter, as part of the positive marketing
strategy utilized by theater reviewers in Britain and then the United
States in the early and mid-1960s. Once the reviewers allowed Pinter
in to their favor, moving him from transgressive to en vogue, they
needed to explain his stylistic originality:
Its usage [Pinteresque] marks Pinter’s acceptance, because it
reflects the reviewers’ assumption that hereafter Pinter’s plays can
be “sold” by a “Pinter” label, detached from the association with
Beckett. This label seems to function as a substitute for
clarification of incoherent elements, thus, familiarizing Pinter’s
unique style, the unfamiliarity of which led to his rejection in the
first place. (Zarhy-Levo 31)
The initial reviewers performed Pinter a service by preparing his
audience for a new experience. However, there still remains a risk of
over-simplification, reducing to a lone signifier everything that
reverberates in every Pinter room.
For now, it is not worth second-guessing if the burden of
Pinteresque indeed “trapped” Pinter; or, was it actually a blessing,
providing resistance that spurred Pinter into new territory. With
hindsight, we know that Pinter’s career is long and varied, punctuated
by milestones that mark shifts in his theatrical journey: The
Homecoming (1965), Silence and Landscape (1968), Betrayal (1978),
A Kind of Alaska (1983), and One for the Road (1984). What is worth
second-guessing is possibility within Pinteresque -- not the
Pinteresque-as-trap and finite, but rather, understanding the
foundational concepts of the word, then discovering its inherent
theatrical possibilities in the present in revivals of Pinter and in new
productions by Pinter’s “inheritors.” I have purposely not listed any
specific attributes of the Pinteresque until now because I wanted to
complicate that defining act with everything that has preceded it.
Pinter’s early room plays capture the Pinteresque, so The
Dumb Waiter is an ideal work to begin to query the word. After
surveying early reviewers’ usage of Pinteresque, Zarhy-Levo clarifies
its typical characterizations as: (1) “Pinter’s atmospheric gift,”
consisting of an atmosphere of menace; (2) Pinter’s “mastery of
rhythmic powerful dialogue,” including “timing” and “use of pauses;” and, (3) Pinter’s “authority to make an audience accept unexplained
actions” (37). Although any act of categorizing poses trouble, Zarhy-
Levo’s summary identifies many of the exciting ideas that early Pinter
offered. I would add a fourth element to Pinteresque, one that has
solidified itself in the 1980s and 90s as Pinter more openly discussed
the political nature of his earliest plays: (4) the potential destruction of
an individual who contends with authority.
As I will show, this addition allows for further exploration of
Pinteresque beyond Pinter’s early work, showing a direct connection
between those first plays and many of his later “political” works.
Another reason for this addition is to fully emphasize the audience’s
cerebral process of discovery as the plot unfolds. The potential
destruction of an individual who contends with authority might
normally be construed as a result of the atmosphere of menace, Zarhy-
Levo’s primary characterization of Pinteresque. Yet, there is a
distinction between the two. During performance, menace is a feeling,
an atmosphere, that fills the theater; alternately, an individual’s
potential destruction arrives as a thought deducted from the texts
(spoken lines, visual elements of acting) provided by Pinter and the
actors.
The critical act of unpacking Pinteresque components in The
Dumb Waiter both simplifies and complicates Pinter’s work. On one
hand, we can tease out different moments of the Pinteresque and
understand how The Dumb Waiter unfolds as a theatrical work; on the
other hand, critical explication reminds us of the almost unlimited
interpretative possibilities in performance. Unlike the structured list
derived from Zarhy-Levo, in performance, Pinteresque characteristics
do not function independently. The Pinteresque is a mix and flow of
moments wherein its components inform each other, heightening the
others simultaneously. For example, drawing from that list above and
applying them to The Dumb Waiter, the eventual pauses would not
feel as pregnant without the dialogic rhythms that intensify back-and-
forth between Ben and Gus. Furthermore, without those same pauses
and how the actors flesh them out, the atmosphere of menace could
not be sustained as thoroughly. Without that same sustained
atmosphere of menace, the unexplained actions might lose their
sinister edge, merely appearing absurd or comic. Finally, without
Ben’s unexplained actions, or the inexplicable and seemingly random intrusions of the dumb waiter, we might not realize the possibility that
Gus is next on the hit list.
As Susan Hollis Merritt states about a performance of The
Dumb Waiter that she attended, “Though to some it might appear
arbitrary or improper, a theatrical production reproduces a play so as
to recreate (for an audience) a so-called meaningful experience, just as
any reading of any play […] attempts to do” (80). Indeed, the stronger
the choices, and the better the theatrical execution, the more effective
the theatrical interpretation. It is my belief that as an actor, director,
and all-around man of the theater, Pinter always writes with the
audience in mind; we must see the Pinteresque as a live, electrical
entity moving between the actors and audience in the same room.
While the atmosphere of menace, the rhythms, the pauses, and
the timing all lend themselves to a structure of feeling, other aspects of
the Pinteresque are cerebral in nature. Questioning and accepting
unexplained actions or details is a cerebral act, as is becoming
conscious of an individual’s impending destruction. Varun Begley
defines Pinteresque as both an implied “unique, artistic voice,
deserving of its own adjectives” and, simultaneously, a “manufactured
feeling-tone [that] one associates with lowbrow cultural forms
(melodrama, thrillers, slapstick comedies, etc.), reducible to a set of
techniques or tricks that can be readily imitated” (24). While Begley’s
first supposition is true, his second assertion is worth questioning. The
Pinteresque as I have defined it here functions as a “feeling-tone,” but
it is more than sensation aimed at the body, as Begley implies.
Begley’s insistence on the Pinteresque “feeling-tone” as a “lowbrow”
shortcut also possibly demonstrates an anti-theatrical bias. While
moments of staging Pinter might mimic melodrama, slapstick, or a
thriller, the plays and their characters are more than melodramatic or
farcical stock characters [or, as Begley implies, actors in pornography
or horror films (23)].
Each of Pinter’s foundational works is a tragicomedy that
requires a high level of artistry and rehearsal to perform well. Pinter is
most interesting and theatrically effecting when actors flesh out and
embody the opposing forces of tragedy and comedy. Such artistry
from the actors includes complex characterization built from moment
to moment, appropriate vocal work and movement, and suitable comic
tone, among other textual interpretive skills. Pinter’s memorable
characters, in order to remain memorable, are not, “readily imitated”
or actable with “tricks” (Begley 24). Perhaps bad Pinter can be
performed or “manufactured” in that context, but not the Pinter
performance that, as Samuel Beckett said about Betrayal, “wrings the
heart” (qtd in Regal 110).3
In the essay also contained in this
collection, “The First Last Look in the Shadows: Pinter and the
Pinteresque,” Anne Luyat emphasizes the “probing exploration of the
human condition” that Pinter’s audiences witness onstage, filled with
tragicomic moments that require gifted actors to stage. Most certainly,
a playwright might attempt to copy The Dumb Waiter or The
Caretaker, but the result would ring hollow theatrically. There is
evidence of successful and less successful Pinter-influenced
(Pinterfluenced?) works later in the chapter.
2. Exploration of the Pinteresque in The Dumb Waiter
Because of the intertwined or melded nature of these strands of the
Pinteresque, it is necessary to isolate three moments in the play and
tease out the different components, while still focusing on their
interrelation. Again, very briefly in skeleton form, the Pinteresque
includes an atmosphere of menace, dialogic rhythms, the withholding
of information, and the potential destruction of an individual. With
that in mind, an excerpt from the beginning of The Dumb Waiter
shows the rhythm in Ben’s and Gus’s dialogue, highlighting the banal
but comic subject matter. Whereas traditionally a playwright might
spend the opening introducing us to the characters and their lives, here
such details are apparently postponed or may never materialize.
Banalities, such as reading unimportant findings from the daily news,
frustrate the full explanation of action or plot advancement:
BEN: What about this? Listen to this!
He refers to the paper.
A man of eighty-seven wanted to cross the road. but there was a
lot of traffic, see? He couldn’t see how he was going to squeeze
through. So he crawled under a lorry.
GUS: He what?
BEN: He crawled under a lorry. A stationary lorry.
GUS: No?
BEN: The lorry started and ran over him.
GUS: Go on!
BEN: That’s what it says here.
GUS: Get away.
BEN: It’s enough to make you want to puke, isn’t it?
GUS: Who advised him to do a thing like that?
BEN: A man of eighty-seven crawling under a lorry!
GUS: It’s unbelievable.
BEN: It’s down here in black and white.
GUS: Incredible. (114)
Like a newspaper, there are facts in this opening sequence
written in “black and white,” but their accumulation does not warrant
much more than face value. The quick rhythms of this initial exchange
are typical of the Pinteresque and the entire play. Ben, the informer,
gives us facts from his newspaper, and Gus receives the information
and responds. Potentially, a hierarchy or pecking order has already
developed in their informer/receiver binary. But perhaps not: the
exchange itself provides plenty for the actors to subtextualize in
performance, and one important choice in Gus’s dialogic responses is
his level of sincerity and the tone he exudes. If he is sincere, and his
rhythm and pace match Ben’s, we sense they are a united team or, at
least, that Gus is loyal. If Gus delays the rhythm of the exchange, or
even if Ben reads more to himself than to Gus, a rift might be implied.
Ben might even be bothered by Gus’ questions. Those cracks, felt as a
hint of menace in the audience, could soon become the realization that
the pair are coming apart, foreshadowing the definitive fissure in the
play’s final tableau.
Another exchange highlights this increasing divide by
revealing selective details about Ben and Gus’s employment. While
working as hired killers already provides a menacing aura, what is
increasingly alarming in the following exchange is just how little Gus
knows about his own existence. We sympathize with Gus because he,
like us, wants more details. The repetition of his seemingly reasonable
questions creates a rhythm of doubt that functions as the scene’s
underscore and pushes the pair further apart. We might view Ben as
less trustworthy or more sinister, because he thwarts Gus’ (and our)
desire for verification. We remain ignorant on the whole, yet still fully
engaged throughout, and we might increasingly note that Gus is
pushing up against an authority figure:
GUS: Eh, I’ve been meaning to ask you.
BEN: What the hell is it now?
GUS: Why did you stop the car this morning in the middle of
that road?
BEN: (lowering the paper) I thought you were asleep.
GUS: I was, but I woke up when you stopped. You did stop,
didn’t you?
Pause.
In the middle of that road. It was still dark, don’t you remember? I
looked out. It was all misty. I thought perhaps you wanted to kip,
but you were sitting up dead straight, like you were waiting for
something.
BEN: I wasn’t waiting for anything.
GUS: I must have fallen asleep again. What was all that about
then? Why did you stop?
BEN: (picking up the paper) We were too early.
GUS: Early? (He rises.) What do you mean? We got the call,
didn’t we, saying we were to start right away. We did.
We shoved out on the dot. So how could we be too
early?
BEN: (quietly) Who took the call? Me or you?
GUS: You.
BEN: We were too early.
GUS: Too early for what?
Pause.
You mean someone had to get out before we got in?
He examines the bedclothes.
I thought these sheets didn’t look too bright. (119-20)
The Pinteresque builds by way of the dialogic rhythm of the
questions; the unexplained details that will remain so (as those
questions go unanswered), and the increasing sense that Gus now
contends with authority, or at the very least, with the authority of Ben.
Furthermore, alongside the lack of detail, the banal prop -- Ben’s
newspaper -- frustrates Gus and us because it is utilized as a shield,
deflecting questions. To increase the tension in performance, the first
pause might be filled with Ben’s surprise that Gus would ask that
question, or at least a silence that makes us want to know even more.
By the second silence, Ben fully communicates that he will
not communicate. Gus’s second question only makes him more
pathetic, and discussing sheets after yet another pause proves Gus’s
downward -- although possibly still slightly comic -- spiral. His non-
sequitur proves his absurd state. While Gus doubts, Ben apparently
does not, or, at the least, Ben tries not to show it. He knows he is a cog
in a larger machine with all its departments, and that is all the
information he needs. Gus has yet to understand his place, and this
weakness is what builds tension in the play.
As the Pinteresque components accumulate, the dramatic
question resounds, “Who is on the other end of the dumb waiter, and
how will their menacing presence affect the characters onstage?” Ben attempts to answer Gus’s queries (and our concerns) about the dumb
waiter, but once Gus erupts, signified by the first “all capitals”
exclamation of the play, Ben lets the moment pass:
BEN: (quickly) No. It’s not funny. It probably used to be a
café here, that’s all. Upstairs. These places change
hands very quickly.
GUS: A café?
BEN: Yes.
GUS: What, you mean this was the kitchen, down here?
BEN: Yes, they change hands overnight, these places. Go into
liquidation. The people who run it, you know, they
don’t find it a going concern, they move out.
GUS: You mean the people who ran this place didn’t find it a
going concern and moved out?
BEN: Sure.
GUS: WELL, WHO’S GOT IT NOW?
Silence.
BEN: What do you mean, who’s got it now?
GUS: Who’s got it now? If they moved out, who moved in?
The box descends with a clatter and bang. Ben levels
his revolver. (132)
The rhythmic repetition of “who’s got it now?” is one of the
key lines of the entire play because it translates to “who’s got us
now?” Who or what controls the room where Ben and Gus, and we,
the audience, now reside? The “clatter and bang” of the dumb
waiter’s descent is a noisy, jarring reminder that some other force
exists outside the immediate room. For the audience, this force is an
addition not listed on the cast list in the program. Ben quickly “levels
his revolver” because he seems nervous about what comes next. This
image is a foreshadowing of The Dumb Waiter’s closing moment,
where Ben stands with gun drawn, and Gus “stumbles in” (121). And,
still, in that final tableau, we are left to question what happens next.
3. Up Against Authority
Like Gus in The Dumb Waiter, there is a populous gallery of Pinter
characters whose distress stems from a run-in with authority. That
gallery bridges Pinter’s career, from the characters in his later political
works -- Gila and Victor (One for the Road, 1985), various prisoners
(Mountain Language, 1988), a nameless blindfolded man (New World
Order, 1991) -- and, back to his earliest plays, Rose and Bert in The Room, and Stanley in The Birthday Party (1959), among many others.
The potential destruction of each character magnifies the Pinteresque
in any given work.
For a long time, Pinter avoided making too much of a political
connection to his works. However, increasingly in usage, the
Pinteresque takes on a political edge, making a more inclusive
approach seem consistent with Pinter’s claim that:
My earlier plays are much more political than they seem on the
face of it. […] [P]lays like The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter
and The Hothouse are metaphors, really. When you look at them,
they’re much closer to an extremely critical look at authoritarian
postures -- state power, family power, religious power, power
used to undermine, if not destroy, the individual, or the
questioning voice, or the voice which simply went away from the
mainstream. (qtd in Ford 85)
One cannot help but think of Gus’s questioning voice and the
metaphorical implications such questioning implies in any rigid
apparatus of power. The same can be said for Bert and Rose in The
Room or Stanley in The Birthday Party. Adding a political edge to the
Pinteresque creates common ground with later more overtly political
Pinter. In the early Pinteresque-filled “room plays,” and in the later
more political plays, there is great concern regarding the abuse of
authority and the environment that cultivates that abuse. One for the
Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), New World Order (1991),
Party Time (1991) and Ashes to Ashes (1996) present political regimes
where torture is never far under the surface of supposed civility.
But Pinter’s statement that his early works are “more political
than they seem,” and that they are “critical look[s]” at authority and
the undermining of the “questioning voice,” gives context to
characters like Gus and Stanley years earlier. For example, as a
questioning voice, Party Time’s (1991) Jimmy deserves comparison to
early Pinter. In the play’s closing moment, Jimmy explains his
punishment for opposing the presiding political power. His speech is
eerily similar to Stanley’s removal from the world of the play in The
Birthday Party. With Party Time and The Birthday Party, Pinter
recycles the word “party” in the title. As Charles Grimes notes, one
can see The Birthday Party’s Stanley reconceptualized and resurrected
as Jimmy in Party Time more than thirty years later (112). Though
both of these Pinter “Party” pieces present literal celebrations, “party” holds a dual meaning in both titles. The playwright puns on the term
for the unnamed factions, or parties, that assert control, first, over the
boarding house where Goldberg and McCann interrogate and extricate
Stanley, and, second, in the flat in Party Time where the ruling elite
celebrate their political status, deliberately avoiding the outside reality
of roadblocks and their disappeared opponents, like Jimmy. Both
Stanley and Jimmy -- and Gus in The Dumb Waiter -- are silenced and
set apart from the parties because of their vocal opposition to
authority.
4. Pinteresque Influence
Adding that political edge to Pinteresque increases the possibilities of
the word and better represents the word’s use by critics in London and
beyond. To further examine this proposition, we can look at some
recent plays performed in London. There is little doubt that Harold
Pinter is the most influential British playwright of the past fifty years.
In 1977, Steven H. Gale proclaimed, “Pinter is by consensus without
question the major force in the contemporary English-speaking
theater” (278).
More recently in 2000, British artistic director Dominic
Dromgoole, who cultivated new theater writing in London in the
1980s and 90s, asserted that Pinter is “still the biggest ship in the fleet.
Still the aircraft carrier from which many planes take off on shorter,
less majestic trips” (8). No one is “more respected by the younger
generation [of playwrights]” than Harold Pinter (225). In 2000, for
example, Dromgoole could look over the past decade in British
theater, with its “in-yer-face” generation or New Brutalism, and see
playwrights like Sarah Kane, Anthony Neilson, Patrick Marber and
Mark Ravenhill, all notably influenced by the 2005 Nobel Prize
Laureate, Pinter.
Granted, identifying influence is a subjective act, a value
judgment based on an individual’s interpretation and experience. Mary
Orr asserts that instead of influence’s “influx” or “flow” arriving
down from the hierarchical stars in a Harold-Bloomian-“Anxiety-of-
Influence”-sense, influence can be imagined as a tributary merging
with another to create a wider river. “Influence for,” as Orr points out,
[r]everses hierarchies or understands influence as complex and
plural…multiple, dialogic or reciprocal […] More radically, a truly influential work may be one that knows its own increase by
being central to others subsequently. Power is in having given to,
not usurping from (83-4).
If The Dumb Waiter is an influential work, and the
Pinteresque still reverberates as a theatrical idea, how is that power
manifest? The quality of a work might be measured by how long we
receive satisfaction from it, or how long it gives new inspiration. Orr
calls it “power,” but we might say “quality” is added to Pinter’s works
when we see his influence in new and unexpected ways. Conversely,
simply repeating Pinter, or mimicking the Pinteresque, adds nothing
to Pinter or our notions of Pinteresque. This would be the trap that
Begley mentions when he presents the Pinteresque as merely a
manufactured phenomenon in performance (24).
Recent theatrical productions in London show the influence of
the Pinteresque, clarify its political edge, and illuminate how the word
is perceived by current critics. First, performed at the Royal Court in
1994, Anthony Neilson’s Penetrator, was one of the first plays of the
wave characterized as in-yer-face theater. In Penetrator, Neilson
mirrors the room play motif of early Pinter plays like The Dumb
Waiter. However, Neilson refashions Pinter’s model to create a room
that changes from dystopian horror to a hopeful final conclusion.
Penetrator’s resolution is a clearing that we arrive to after
experiencing components of the Pinteresque: the ambiguities, the
menace, the terror, and threats from authority, all drift away like fog.
Neilson’s play details the arrival of Tadge, a Gulf War I veteran who
has his share of mental issues, to the flat of an old friend Max.
Tadge’s odd actions build to a tense climax that brings up issues of the
friends’ past. But without the Pinteresque components that Neilson
works into Penetrator, none of what follows after the climax would
have the same value; because of the tension in the room, we are
prepared for the peaceful post-Pinteresque resolution. Neilson does
not end his play with uncertainty or even the grimness with which
Pinter ends his. While describing the original production of Neilson’s
play, Aleks Sierz, author of In-Yer-Face Theatre, briefly connects
Penetrator to the abuses of early and later Pinter. Quoting Tadge’s
description of the “penetrators,” Sierz asserts that, “Tadge’s paranoid
fantasies occur in a ‘black room.’ His idea of the tormentors is
reminiscent of Pinter’s vision of torture” (80). In Penetrator, in the
early room plays, and in the later more political Pinter plays, there is great concern regarding the abuse of authority and the environment
that cultivates that abuse.
The most renowned playwright of the in-yer-face generation,
Sarah Kane, has also been compared to Pinter, and she admitted
Pinter’s influence on her work. Although Graham Saunders never uses
the word Pinteresque, he connects Kane’s controversial debut work,
Blasted (1995), to Harold Pinter’s room play form, specifically The
Dumb Waiter. Saunders notes the small hotel room in Kane’s play, the
similar chaos that lurks outside in both works, the series of knocks on
doors that we never fully comprehend, and finally, that Gus, Ben, and
Kane’s Ian all work as hired killers -- continuously and ominously
checking and rechecking their guns (56-7).
While later critics have noted Pinteresque connections in
these plays from Kane and Neilson, none of the initial reviewers
labeled the plays as such. This is perhaps because Neilson’s play was
not a huge event or much reviewed at first, although since its
premiere, it has received several exciting revivals. Much attention was
given to Blasted, but almost all the critics’ column-inches were
reserved for shock and awe at the extreme acts on stage.
Often one can better understand a concept by clarifying what
it is not. An explicit example of this is Patrick Marber’s Closer
(1997), one of the more celebrated convergences between Pinter’s
work and a younger playwright. Simply put, no critic ever labeled
Marber’s play Pinteresque, perhaps because it did not emphasize any
of the characteristics that have been emphasized here as indicative of
that term. Nevertheless, when Marber’s exploration of love, sex and
deceit premiered at the National Theater, numerous reviewers found in
Closer reflections of Pinter’s play Betrayal (1978). As a play from
Pinter’s middle period, Betrayal does not address the same issues of
power and abuses of authority categorized in the early and later plays
as the Pinteresque. Betrayal and Closer share the subject matter of
love and deceit, as well as an episodic scene structure that often skips
months and years at a time. Both transpire in realistic contemporary
middle-class London living rooms, flats, restaurants and bars. Both
manipulate time: Betrayal’s scenes unfold mostly in reverse, whereas
Closer’s action occasionally overlaps in time sequences. Both plays
have a limited number of characters with intertwined interests
(Betrayal has three characters; Closer has four). These characters
navigate the mundane while also wounding or being wounded in love. The reviewers themselves celebrated Marber without seeing
his Pinter connection as a negative factor. For example, David
Benedict of The Independent found that from Closer, “British
naughtiness and innuendo have been banished. Instead, there are
echoes of Pinter’s Betrayal or a London take on Mamet’s Sexual
Perversity in Chicago” (5). Alastair Macaulay of the Financial Times
wrote that “one can, I think, mention Closer in the same breath as
Betrayal” (1997, 8). While Charles Spencer of The Daily Telegraph
concluded that, “Though Marber’s style and vision are his own, there
are moments in this new piece which reminded me of both Pinter’s
Betrayal and David Hare’s Skylight. What’s amazing is that Closer
can stand comparison with such magnificent plays” (2008). Finally,
Matt Wolf, writing in Variety, made an initial Pinter connection, and
then focused more specifically on Closer “coming to a climax of sorts
in a restaurant encounter that neatly distills Pinter’s Betrayal” (103).
Since Closer’s opening, as the play moved from the smaller Cottlesloe
auditorium at the National Theater to the larger Lyttleton, and then to
the West End, Broadway, and everywhere else via stage and motion
picture, other prominent theater critics positively connect Marber with
Pinter. The Guardian’s Michael Billington calls Marber one of the
“younger writers” among the “numerous beneficiaries” of Pinter’s
“legacy” as evidenced in Marber’s “sexually exploratory” Closer
(2001, 2.1). The Independent’s Paul Taylor identifies Pinter as one of
Marber’s “main writing influences” (5). But while all those critics
have seen Marber as Pinter influenced, none have seen his works as
Pinteresque.
More recently, in tactical coordination with the 2005 Nobel
Prize announcement, some London theatrical premieres seem to have
taken off from that influential aircraft carrier, “HMS Pinter.” When I
interviewed in-yer-face playwright Mark Ravenhill just after Pinter
won the Nobel Prize, the young dramatist mentioned that his next
play, The Cut (2006),
[i]s probably the most Pinter-like play that I’ve written. It’s not
the same really, but when people ask me what’s it like, and I’m
trying to describe it, I say it’s a little bit like Mountain Language
or one of those kind of plays. It’s set in a fictional country. And
the process of oppression that goes on is like one of those later
Pinter plays, like One for the Road or Mountain Language.
(“Ravenhill interview”) But Ravenhill utilized the Pinter parallel in a specific situation:
“people ask me what The Cut’s like.” Needing to succinctly explain
his work caused Ravenhill to use Pinter as accessible shorthand even
though it was perhaps not altogether correct. This sort of limitation
happens to some extent in all communication, but Ravenhill turns
critic when he attempts to explain The Cut. The critical desire to
classify, to sort, to provide access, is always in battle with a dangerous
tendency to reduce. This same process can happen when critics
overuse Pinteresque.
That said, a few months after Mark Ravenhill’s quick
description of The Cut, many London theater critics identified Pinter
parallels in varying degrees, including Pinteresque components in his
play. Premiered at the Donmar Warehouse, Ravenhill’s play is about a
torturer who administers “the cut” -- a quick operation for enemies of
the state that makes them more agreeable. In three lengthy scenes, we
see Paul, the cutter, played by Ian McKellen, go through a personal
crisis of guilt; first, with a young male prisoner who wants the cut as a
badge of honor; second, with his wife at home; third with his
politically-minded son, who, as part of the new guard overtaking the
state, considers his father evil.
Toby Young of The Spectator said that “To call The Cut
Pinteresque doesn’t do justice to Ravenhill’s earnest duplication of
most every trope in the Nobel Prize winner’s theatrical playbook. It is
more like a fawning homage, a deferential tribute.” But Young is
never completely clear on what he means by Pinteresque -- since the
rest of the review provides no clear clues to the reasons for his
assessment. He believes Ravenhill’s play is incomprehensible and
boring, so perhaps he thinks the same of Pinter!
Sarah Hemming of The Financial Times is a little clearer in
her review: “It’s a Pinteresque study of power play and moral
equivocation set in a nameless state” (12). In addition, while never
using the Pinteresque label, Jane Edwardes of Time Out London, lists
some of the components: “The details are vague and the atmosphere
tense. Ravenhill’s play owes something to Pinter not just in its power
struggles, but also in the way it harks on certain words” (232). Perhaps
the most humorous review came from Quentin Letts of The Daily Mail
who simultaneously insults Pinter while adding a non-complimentary
prefix to our word: “Quite well acted but pseudishly cryptic, The Cut
is a sub-Pinteresque affair. Yes, even worse than old gloomy guts!”
(Sec 4.8) While never using the word Pinteresque, The Daily
Telegraph’s Charles Spencer gives the most insightful comments of
all the reviews:
Mark Ravenhill’s new play is so up to its ears in debt to Harold
Pinter that I’m not sure whether the Nobel Laureate should be
merely flattered or demanding a slice of the royalties. Initially
intriguing, but ultimately frustrating, the piece combines the
enigma and menace of early Pinter with the political anger of late
Pinter. […] But what are we meant to read into The Cut? Like
Pinter, Ravenhill withholds information more conventional
dramatists would consider crucial. (2006, 28)
Most important to our reconsideration of Pinteresque here is
Spencer’s convergence of early and later Pinter. The Cut withholds
information like all of Pinter’s plays, but, importantly, Pinter
supplements his ambiguity with precise images and clever dialogue
that keep the audience intrigued -- Pinter’s authority listed in Zarhy-
Levo’s characteristics. Ravenhill, unfortunately, falls short on the
horrific or pathos-inducing details that hold our interest and tie us
emotionally to the play. The conversations between torturer and
tortured mirror Pinter’s later works like One for the Road and Ashes to
Ashes. And the bare, simple language and repetition could come from
a number of Pinter’s works. The three scenes allow us to see Paul the
Cutter from three different angles, but their cumulative effect is not as
powerful as some of Ravenhill’s other works. And so, unlike
Penetrator or even Blasted, to use Mary Orr’s phrase, Pinter’s
influence is not quite “influence for” anything new.
One week after The Cut opened at the Donmar, Jez
Butterworth’s The Winterling premiered at the Royal Court.
Butterworth’s best known play is the 1995 in-yer-face hit, Mojo,
which involves 1950’s English gangsters and was made into a movie
starring Harold Pinter. Butterworth keeps the gangsters around for The
Winterling, and he keeps Pinter around in spirit too.
Set in a farmhouse in the countryside region of Dartmoor, the
plot involves gangsters, revenge, surprises, a slightly hopeful ending,
and a character who is a reincarnated Davies from The Caretaker. Of
the thirteen reviews in the London press, twelve of them connect The
Winterling to Pinter in various ways, including a close connection to
The Dumb Waiter and the Pinteresque presence. Benedict
Nightingale’s review in The Times echoes that “Harold Pinter himself hates the word Pinteresque.” But Nightingale continues the tricky
process of critical comparison by saying “but if ever [Pinteresque]
were apt it is here” (21). Helpfully, Nightingale gets more specific
with a list of characteristics:
If you know Pinter’s Dumb Waiter you’ll have an inkling and if
you know the rest of Pinter’s work you’ll find much that’s
familiar in a play with more than its quota of disturbing intruders,
innocent-seeming yet loaded exchanges, amorphous threats,
deviousness, mystification and eccentric attempts to gain territory
or dominate others. (21)
Likewise, Alastair Macaulay asserts that “Act One feels
Pinterer-than-thou; Act Two, with its ambiguities of who used to be
what and who will do what to whom, looks like variations on the fall-
guy strangeness of Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter” (2006, 11). And,
finally, Michael Billington of The Guardian saw The Winterling’s
biggest influence as Pinter, calling his presence “ubiquitous,” and
noting that “the denouement inescapably evokes The Dumb Waiter”
(2006, 34).
As with The Cut, there is not much of what Orr calls a
“dialogue” between the old text and the new. It is in not introducing
anything new dramatically or worth celebrating theatrically that
Butterworth and Ravenhill fall short. And because Ravenhill and
Butterworth are prominent, celebrated young writers producing plays
at the most prominent theaters, this falling short is worth noting.
Michael Billington of The Guardian agrees that Pinter’s “distinctive
voice is reverberating through British drama in ways that begin to
worry me. […] After seeing [The Winterling] and The Cut, I’m
concerned that too many writers are imitating the master’s voice rather
than discovering their own” (34). As can be seen, like it or not,
Pinteresque is the most common term used for that imitation.
Yet, embracing the Pinteresque, or other aspects of Pinter’s
work, does not have to be framed pejoratively. In 2004, Ben Brantley
of the New York Times wrote an article called “Pinter Is Still Pointing
the Way, With Shadows and Darkness,” a critique which posits
Pinter’s influence on Michael Frayn’s Democracy and Conor
McPherson’s Shining City. His criterion for the Pinteresque was that
both new works acknowledge the unknowability of people in personal
and public realms. Importantly, both plays offer us so much more than
mere repetition of that Pinterly characteristic. Speaking subjectively, upon reading Brantley’s article and realizing the plays’
intertextualities, I was pleasantly surprised, especially with respect to
McPherson’s play, which I had read a few times but never thought of
as Pinteresque. I found Shining City touching, and then I realized it
touched me in a similar tragicomic way to how The Dumb Waiter and
Betrayal affect me, because of the ultimate impenetrability of the
characters’ selves and situations. This unknowability can be
simultaneously comic and tragic in its irony.
As Anne Luyat quotes Pinter’s Nobel Prize speech at the end
of her essay in this volume, so can I: “Truth in drama is forever
elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive.” In
McPherson’s Shining City, we search for the details between a man
and his deceased wife who now haunts him. Democracy, Frayn’s play
about Chancellor Willy Brandt of West Germany, also reminds us that
almost everyone is a contradiction, a variety of selves. As in The
Dumb Waiter, where actions and characters go unexplained,
incongruities and gaps drive each play. And again we feel the
Pinteresque as an individual contending with authority: the individual
is each of us, contending with that elusive authority, Truth.
Marc E. Shaw, Hartwick College
Notes
1
Axelrod, 3.
2
The dates I list are publication dates of the scripts, as dates of first performance vary
depending on criteria of what one considers a “first” performance (whether it be a
university performance, tour outside of London, radio performance, or London
premiere, for example).
3
Beckett was referring to Emma and Jerry’s final gaze in a draft of Betrayal that
Pinter had sent him. However, this phrase applies to many of Pinter’s works.