Theatre
Pinter's progress
Kenneth Hurren 1'
The Caretaker by Harold Pinter (Shaw) No Man's Land by Harold Pinter (lyttelton at the National Theatre) Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land by Tom Stoppard (Almost Free Theatre 'Club) The Other Side of the Swamp by Royce RYton (King's Head, Islington) Lenz by Mike Stott (Hampstead Theatre Club)
The revival of The Caretaker, first seen some sixteen years ago, and the return of No ,Alan's Land to the repertory of the National Theatre afford an instructive demonstration nt. Harold Pinter's progress in his art, which Ri afraid I have always tended to regard as a species of confidence trick. This is a wayward view, which finds me leaping like a trout against the stream of received opinion. The best I can muster in the way of appreciation is some enjoyment of his blither humours, but the incontrovertible fact is that Pinter not only has made a vast comMercial success of works that are roughly as Intelligible as the conversations of loquacious lunatics (though he has, I believe, abandoned the practice of actually visiting rnental institutions with a tape-recorder) but has inspired many a scholarly treatise beSides, Indeed, a major reason for the revival of The Caretaker is the appearance of the play on the Oxford and Cambridge Alevel syllabus, and the canny recognition on the part of its promoters that this can do no conceivable harm at the box office.
Although the beleaguered striplings might be expected to' be resentful of this perplex!ng burden, or even to feel indignant about Its inclusion in studies otherwise devoted to writers of the ilk of Milton and Shakespeare, a Private poll I have taken reveals that most cif them react remarkably cheerfully. Their attitude struck me as much the same as that 01. the art forgers who welcomed action Painting on the ground that it made their Work a lot easier: the general view among s.Ixth-formers, according to my small samp g is that, so long as they toss in a handful Of obligatory phrases referring to 'speech rhythms' and 'intangible menace' and 'pregnant pauses', it doesn't really matter much What they say about Pinter, since their tutors don't know what he's on about, either. This is quite deplorably disrespectful, although there is something to be said for regarding it as illuminatingly percipient and `r1 engaging endorsement of the 'out-of',Ile-mouths-of' theory. I should myself prefer. a warmer appreciation of the playwrIghes self-made corner in a competitive .111arket, and some esteem for his cool nerve and smooth expertise in getting away with
it. Throwing out a few carefully worded hints himself, such as, 'Given a man in a room, he will sooner or later receive a visitor' or 'The more acute the experience the less articulate its expression' or 'There can be no hard distinctions between what is true and what is false', he has safely been able to leave it to the science of convoluted criticism to spin off from there into the lucrative realms of dotty discussion. None of us is entirely immune to the bait. Like a man drawn against his better judgment into trying to 'find the lady', I have been embarrassed to find myself speculating on such matters as whether Hirst and Spooner (in No Man's Land) are actually the same man, and whether there is significance in the fact that their names are those of bygone cricketers (who, for aught I know, may go together as inseparably as Hobbs and Sutcliffe or Thomson and Lillee), and whether there is some clue to something or other in references to Sidcup or Bolsover Street. There are, of course, no clues to anything in a Pinter play; the crossword lights are all unclued, no solution will be published.
I'm not sure that No Man's Land is a better 'play' than The Caretaker (insofar as it is a play at all, it looks uncommonly like the same one), but it is pleasanter to watch and hear. The stranger, brought home to a mysterious house where, grateful but bewildered, his reactions alternate between apprehensiveness and insouciance, is in each case a sort of vagrant; but I prefer by far the down-at-heel litterateur, Spooner, to the unsavoury old tramp, Davies. Pinter has been honing and polishing his 'art' these sixteen years, and he is writing confidently about a better class of person nowadays. They inhabit more salubrious homes (compare the elegance of Hirst's Hampstead mansion with the rag-and-bone pad of the brain-damaged brothers, Mick and Aston), and the conversation is more elevated, even, on occasion, witty. Spooner, though he has some fatiguing pretensions, is generally agreeable company. Buttonholed by the unkempt and unwashed Davies, I should count a pound well spent to be rid of him.
It is true that, in The Caretaker, Pinter works a good line in the humour of incongruity with Davies, a gruesome bundle of tatterdemalion rags, who at one point is asked, deadpan, by Mick, 'Where do you bank ?'; but the same formula works just as well in No Man's Land, as when the plainly indigent Spooner, offered a bottle of champagne for breakfast by Hirst's butler, inquires blandly whether it has been properly chilled, and sniffs and sips at it fastidiously before drinking it. John Gielgud's unhurried savouring of this particular moment is one of a hundred sublime touches in a memorable performance. Most of the time I had not the smallest notion of what Sir John's part was about and what, if anything, his acting was essentially intended to convey, and some of the time I rather doubted whether he knew himself; but this is a consideration that seems not to bother actors in Pinter plays. The rather special nature of the characters they are called upon to portray releases them from the ordinary and arduous demands of verisimilitude, and they have a generally wonderful time exercising their techniques in that headily free air. Both these productions are estimably performed: Ralph Richardson as Hirst, and Terence Rigby and Michael Feast as his servants complete the cast of No Man's Land, and The Caretaker has Fulton Mackay as Davies, and Roger Lloyd Pack and Simon Rouse as the brothers.
At the Almost Free, I spent a diverting lunchtime with Tom Stoppard's two brief items, one of them staged as an interlude in the other. Dirty Linen is hilariously concerned with the deliberations of a Parliamentary Select Committee, inquiring into allegations of sexual immorality among members of both Houses, which is steered by an enthusiastically concupiscent secretary to the conclusion that this is none of the newspapers' or the public's business, a conclusion not unconnected with the fact that most of the committee members are sportily involved in the hanky-panky. NewFound-Land, which interrupts their agitated discussion, irrelevantly couples an anecdote about Lloyd George with an affectionate spoof of the American Dream in monologues entrusted to Richard Goolden and Stephen Moore, who are as admirable as the parliamentary performers (most notably Benjamin Whitrow, Edward de Souza and Peter Bowles) in the companion exercise. Neither caprice is extended beyond the improvisational inspiration of their author who is never unduly facetious.
If we know more or less where we are with Stoppard, two other playwrights with pieces on the 'fringe' seem resistant to affording us that comfort. Royce Ryton, who so profitably chronicled the domestic affairs of our royals in Crown Matrimonial, has turned his attention to the exploration of a homosexual relationship in The Other Side of the Swamp and also acts in it as a flabby well-heeled actor who adopts a rough and willing lad, whom he importunes in a public lavatory, as a homo of his own to assist in his masochistic proclivities; the developing romance of this disparate pair would seem novelettishly maudlin if attributed to heterosexuals, but Ryton retrieves the situation fairly entertainingly by a droll awareness of its absurdity. On the other hand, Stott's Lenz is in gruelling contrast to his raucous Funny Peculiar, and its laborious account of the disintegration of an eighteenth-century German poet with religious hang-ups is not redeemed from tedium even by the agonised sensitivit) of Jonathan Pryce's performance as the protagonist.
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