Theater: Finger Exercises in Dread

The Room and A Slight Ache. Harold Pinter’s plays not only have plots; they often seem to be plots. He conspires to elude, delude, tease, frustrate, irritate, and mystify the audience, all of course to a highly salutary end. Pinter leads the playgoer very far from home to signify that something at the mysterious heart of human existence consists in being precisely there—very far from home. The Room and A Slight Ache are early Pinter one-acters of quasi-comic menace, not always dexterous but distinctly absorbing, the work of a man forming his own indelible dramatic signature.

The Room takes place in the cozy, mangy flat of Mr. and Mrs. Hudd. Mrs. Hudd (Frances Sternhagen) tongue-rattles along at a great rate—about the icy weather through which her husband (Clarence Felder) must drive his van, about the unoccupied basement apartment she fears is occupied, about the tea and toast and trivia that mortise daily life. The landlord, who may not be the landlord, enters and reminisces about his mother and sister, who may or may not have been Jewish. After the landlord and the husband depart, a young apartment-hunting couple intrude with the disconcerting news that the Hudds’ apartment is supposed to be unoccupied.

Agitatedly, the landlord reappears to tell Mrs. Hudd that a man in a darkened room in the basement demands to see her. The man proves to be a blind Negro (Robertearl Jones) who begs her to come home and implies that he is her father. Mr. Hudd returns, savagely batters the Negro to the floor, and as the curtain starts to drop, Mrs. Hudd turns blind. There are no safe guesses when it comes to Pinter, but a half-safe guess is that the blind Negro is Death or Fate, the ultimate invaders of cozy islands of tranquillity.

A Slight Ache lasts longer but makes its point quicker and clearer. Edward and Flora, a husband and wife, are enjoying a sunlit view of their country-house garden. He (Henderson Forsythe) is a scholar of distant cultures. She (Frances Sternhagen) is a busy suburban bee. Edward is obsessively irked by a human blight just beyond the garden, an aged, decrepit match-seller who haunts the forsaken site from dawn to dusk with no prospect of selling matches. Edward invites the old man into the house to have it out with him. The matchseller looks like a cross between a Skid Row derelict and a desert-baked Bible prophet, and he remains silent throughout the play. For Edward, the matchseller is the mirror image of his fears and failures, and in self-defensive, self-incriminating monologues, Edward crumbles like dry rot.

For Flora, the matchseller reflects her desires and the need to love and cherish a man. Husband and bum reverse roles, and at play’s end, Flora puts the matchseller’s tray between Edward’s nerveless fingers and grasps the old man’s hand in hers.

The spirit of Edgar Allan Poe hovers over these playlets, not only in brooding menace, but in the sealed and airless abodes where characters are filled with the breath of death. The actors seem perfectly attuned to this death’s dream kingdom, most notably Frances Sternhagen, who is scrupulously convincing as she shifts from the droning drab of The Room to the animated superficial niceties of professional wifeliness in A Slight Ache.

These early dramas were Pinter’s finger exercises on the theme of dread. Later, he wrote his symphony of fear in The Caretaker. He is a master of the theater of equivalence—finding opaque stage symbols of terror that match and fuse with the nameless panic that modern-day playgoers bring into the theater with them. What he may hopefully achieve in the future is a new and transcending vision that pierces and subordinates fear.