I went to see the first Pinter at the Pinter performance tonight.
To explain—Harold Pinter (1930 – 2008) was one of the most influential British dramatists of all time. His most famous long-form plays include The Birthday Party, The Caretaker and The Homecoming.
Right now, the Harold Pinter theatre in London (just down the road from my current residence) is showing a whole season of his lesser-known, one-act plays, from now right into February next year.
As a huge Pinter fan my aim is to get to all of these shows.
If you know nothing about Pinter, what do you need to know? His heritage was Polish and Ukrainian and he was of Jewish origin. He became increasingly political towards the end of his life, speaking out strongly against the Iraq war and Israel.
His drama, while not quite absurdist, was certainly influenced by Samuel Beckett’s writing, and is not realist. Instead, he created dramatic structures out of language that, while operating like ‘normal’ plays, are not ‘normal’, since characters’ biographies, back-stories and motivations remain ambiguous and opaque.
As a result, watching his stuff is strangely disconcerting. On a superficial level you know what’s going on—two people are in a room talking, it’s a party, we’re in a prison cell, and so on—but on a more fundamental level you’re in the dark. Why are these people here? What do they mean by the things that they are saying? And why is there always a sense of menace even when the dialogue seems passingly banal?
All of which makes Pinter’s style especially apposite for tackling politics, since politics is a game played with language where ambiguity is not merely a bug, but rather a central and necessary feature.
Which leads me to tonight’s performance of his one-act plays One For The Road, The New World Order, Mountain Language, Ashes To Ashes, The Pres and an Officer, Death, and others.
The first section, before the interval, was a rapid fire round of most of these plays, with the longest being One For The Road, which lasted for around 30 minutes. After the break we saw Ashes to Ashes in its entirety: a longer piece coming up on an hour.
That first section was something like a sketch show filtered through the aesthetic palette of Black Mirror. Dystopian set-ups came, one after another. A newly appointed minister for culture being interviewed by the press, boasting about his plans to stifle ‘critical dissent’. A head of a jail, a torturer, interviewing, separately, a dissident, his wife, and their child (off-stage the man is tortured, his wife serially raped and—we assume—the child murdered). A Donald Trump-styled president of the United States orders the ‘nuking’ of London, mistaking it for the capital of France. And the wives and mothers of imprisoned dissenters come to visit their husbands in a military prison only to be abused and told that their ‘language’ is no longer permitted.
Rather like a night out with Kafka and George Orwell, the performances sparkled intellectually, while not exactly being a barrel of laughs. Pinter’s main interests (as always) seem to be the ways in which language can be weaponised—fashioned into a tool for obfuscation, opening up a path whereby atrocities may be committed.
As much as anything, we are reminded that might makes right. There is no moral compass and it never matters who is the more intelligent or has the best arguments—power, jackboot-shod, with rape and castration as its weapons, wins out in the end.
It’s depressing, dystopian stuff. No wonder I overheard one woman asking an attendant if the second half was as bad, since the first had ‘traumatised’ her.
Actually, Ashes to Ashes was in some ways a little less brutal than the jab-jab-punch round that preceded it. At first appearing to depict a domestic argument between a husband and wife, with the wife confessing to an infidelity, by the end it appeared that the wife had been driven insane by having her baby taken away in an undefined military scenario (perhaps echoing the holocaust).
In other words, the political was front and centre in each of these pieces in a way that—it goes without saying—felt incredibly timely. The Jamie Lloyd company always do great productions and have a knack of dusting off old texts and making them sparklingly relevant.
And at a point in history when everyone should keep copies of the aforementioned Kafka and Orwell by the bed to shed a little light on what’s going on in the world, Pinter’s is another essential voice for elucidating, if not the meaning of contemporary polities, then at least its shape and drivers.
Pinter One is on until the 20th October and it’s well worth seeing if you’re in London.
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