New Plays: The Word as Weapon

Harold Pinter is the Pavlov of playwrights. He feeds questions and withholds answers, leaving playgoers in a state of salivary anxiety. Written by Pinter in 1958, but opening on Broadway last week, The Birthday Party is certain to evoke in audiences another tantalized swivet.

The play’s deadfall guy, Stanley (James Patterson), a paranoid expianist, is a mildly sinister human cipher and the sole boarder of a dilapidated rooming house at an English seaside resort. His landlady, Meg (Ruth White) cuddles and cossets him; unfailingly, she treats Stanley and her whey-faced husband to the breakfast specialty of the house, corn flakes and fried bread. Stanley has even less stomach for breakfast when he learns that two men named Goldberg (Ed Flanders) and McCann (Edward Winter) have come to the house as roomers.

McCann is edgy and truculent; Goldberg is expansive and sentimental as he reminisces about his mother’s gefilte fish. In Act II, they pistol-whip Stanley with words—mad, flailing non sequiturs—charging that he “betrayed the organization.” A birthday party for Stanley turns into a Walpurgisnacht, as the lights go out and Stanley goes berserk trying to throttle Meg and rape a nubile bundle of fluff called Lulu (Alexandra Berlin). Act III finds Stanley looking like a waxed zombie, Goldberg and McCann promising that “Monty” will take care of Stanley, and escorting him to something that seems suspiciously like a hearse. At the end, Meg and her husband retire to their corn flakes.

What is Stanley’s crime? Are Goldberg and McCann agents of a murder ring, symbols of organized society, or instruments of fate? What torture do the pair inflict on Stanley? Rarely has Pinter left more to the playgoer’s imagination. The American cast keeps its English accents tidy but not its performances, and Director Alan Schneider lets the first act drowse. Basically, the play lacks the athletic snap and resonance of The Caretaker’s dialogue and the musky animal magnetism of The Homecoming family. But whether or not he baffles playgoers, Harold Pinter exerts a modish appeal for an age of jitters that likes its comedy sauced with cruelty. He taps the adrenal flow of anxiety and guilt that contemporary audiences bring into the theater with them. Mirrored in his comedies of terror, playgoers can see the resurgence of their own childlike fears, sense their own sadomasochistic impulses, detect the image of themselves as pawns of chance in a chaotic and absurd cosmos.

Pinter’s play patterns coalesce about three recurring elements and phases—the room, the torment, and the expiation. The room is the setting, the torment is often an extended abrasive comic put-on, and the expiation is usually an act of physical or psychic violence. The room is a square womb. Though lighted, it seems dark, partly because it is sometimes windowless or tightly curtained against any blade of outside light. Outside this haven of refuge lurks the nameless, faceless intruder who will violate the safety and innocence of the room.

The knock, when it comes, transforms the room into a kind of torture chamber, in which the welts are raised by laughs. The put-on is a game in which the victim does not know either the rules or the stakes. The victim appears more helpless and the game more sinister in that two or three men usually tease, bully and mystify him. The Caretaker, for example, is an extended put-on: the old tramp Davies is led to believe by the two brothers, Mick and

Aston, that he will be made a caretaker for their property. Lured into relying on the favor of each brother in turn, he is humiliated by both and finally gets a callous heave-ho.

The torment is often comic, but it is no laughing matter. In Pinter as in Kafka, punishment presupposes guilt, even if the crime is unspecified. The act of atonement is always arbitrary. In expiation, a Pinter hero-victim may lose his life, or his wife, or his mind. Kafka’s religious overtones find no echo in Pinter. To him, the universe runs with the remorseless senselessness of a concentration camp.

Squalid, vicious, mean and stupid, Pinter’s characters may seem to deserve all the bad things in life. They are certainly a thoroughly unsympathetic lot, and not one of them ever performs a generous act. They are animals, but first of all they are theatrical animals. They hold the stage like a military position. An actor long before he became a playwright, Pinter writes scenes with which actors can rivet an audience’s attention. His stage animals circle and sniff and snarl and claw at each other, and the odor of vitality permeates the playhouse. These animals have been released from the cages of the poor; they are nasty and virulent over trifles, since the little they have to lose is their all. In this asphalt-jungle world, all trust has been lost and suspicion breeds menace.

No matter how sluggish they may appear, Pinter’s people arrive on stage primed for combat, and words are their weapons. For a Tennessee Williams, language is a rhetorically scented bouquet of roses to be showered on an audience in fond profusion. To Pinter, language is sniper fire: laconic, staccato, precise, designed to cut down the people one hates. He uses two kinds of speech: words that are dead and words that can kill. The dead words are the burnt-toast banalities of daily life: “I’ve got your corn flakes ready. Here’s your

I corn flakes. Are they nice?” They mock

the character who utters them. The killing words often sound deceptively mild,

but they signify a shift in the balance

of power:

Goldberg: Why did the chicken cross j the road?

Stanley: He wanted to—he wanted to …

McCann: Chicken? Egg? Which came | first?

Goldberg and McCann: Which came first? Which came first? Which came first?

Where such playwrights as Christopher Fry and T. S. Eliot tried to pour drama into forms of poetry that could be swallowed as painlessly as prose, Pinter has achieved a more subtly musical poetry of rhythms, an antiphony of repetitions and pauses. Each of his plays seems composed, as well as written.

The glibbest assumption about Pinter—that he dramatizes the severed communication lines of modern man—is the least accurate. Not inability to communicate but unwillingness to communicate is his central theme. He argues: “I think that we communicate only too well, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.” And so, to Pinter’s people, speech is a strategy for escaping detection. They reverse their statements and talk past other people in order to avoid their reach. Like children, they refuse to answer questions because they hear them all too clearly.

With all this evasive action at the heart of his plays it is apparent that Pinter would rather transcribe a state of being than subscribe to a statement of belief. Still, it is possible to spot a few of the dimes of thought he is dancing on. They are all theatrical ideas, perhaps excessively so. Pirandello is his playwrighting godfather, and all of Pinter’s plays could be subtitled “Right You Are, If You Think You Are.” Like Pirandello, he believes that illusion is infinite and that truth and reality lie in the eye of the beholder. He assumes that situation dominates character, so that in a different situation the person would be different. Instead of motivation, which implies continuity of personality, Pinter’s characters harbor a potential for violence. In a sense, they are socio-historical dropouts: except for their psychological quirks and fears, they are never placed in any context beyond the stage.

What endows Pinter with his immense theatricality also seems to stunt the scope of his mind and art. All the world’s a stage, but the stage is not all of the world. The question remains whether Pinter, having amply proved bis ability to capture a particular mode and style of dramatic existence, can or will move on to describe more comprehensive states of being.