Intruduction 3 Chapter I. Harold Pinter: The dramatist and his world 5

1.3 Tales of the city: some places and voices in Pinter’s plays.

Some places and voices in Pinter’s plays The double bill of The Room and Celebration at the Almeida Theatre in March 2001 provided a unique occasion on which to attempt to obtain some view or perspective on Pinter. Here were his first and his latest play, forty-three years between them, directed by the author, with an excellent cast, many of them experienced Pinter actors, four of them playing in both plays: The Room given an evocatively detailed ‘period’ setting, drab, utilitarian, a murky refuge warmed by a flickering gas-fire and filled with the depressing lodging-house furniture of the 1950s; Celebration took place in a smart, postmodern restaurant, all curved banquettes and ostentatious table linen, a glance, according to some of the first-night critics, at ‘The Ivy’, but replicated in many of the smarter establishments in the streets outside the theatre. Private and public, domestic and social: nice weak tea and bacon and eggs in The Room, duck, osso bucco and Frascati for the ladies in Celebration.
Even the names resonate differently: ordinary or formal in The Room: Bert and Rose, Mr Kidd, Riley; and a less specific, apparently classless fluidity in Celebration’s Lambert, Prue, Suki, Richard. This was London, and Islington, then and now. Pinter’s plays have always challenged the critics, from the initial bewilderment over The Birthday Party, to their responses to later shifts of tone and mode such as those deployed in One for the Road, or Ashes to Ashes. Understandably, the juxtaposition of The Room and Celebration seemed like a challenge, and few resisted. Bizarrely, some even reviewed the audience – ‘gales of sycophantic laughter’ (Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph);3 ‘cyclonic gales of snobby laughter’ (Roger Foss in What’s On, who went on to source some of them). The laughter reviewed was in reaction to Celebration, which formed the second part of the bill; and other reviews commented on the unexpectedly relentless comic nature of the play, ‘certainly his funniest and also perhaps his most accessible script for many years’, according to Sheridan Morley. Was there a sense that Pinter, who has always used comedy in the most uncomfortable contexts, should not be making an audience laugh quite so much, or so easily? Certainly, the direction and acting were brilliant – almost all the critics agreed about that. So was it the wrong sort of laughter, or the wrong target? Was Pinter being trivial, or satirising the trivial?
At one level, the comedy begins in a relatively straightforward manner. There are two tables of diners, two celebrations. At one, a pair of brothers married to a pair of sisters, celebrating a wedding anniversary: they are brash, vulgar, aggressive. The men are ‘strategy consultants’, peaceful ones – they do not carry guns; the women do charities. At the other, a banker celebrates his recent promotion with his wife, who teaches infants. The jokes come fast: ‘Well I know Osso was Italian but I know bugger all about Bucco.’ ‘I didn’t know arsehole was Italian.’ ‘Yes, but on the other hand what’s the Italian for arsehole?’ Not brilliant on the page, perhaps, but effective in the theatre – gales of laughter, possibly. But the payoff to the opening sequence is Prue’s toast: ‘Julie, Lambert. Happy anniversary.’ The celebration is under way, and as in previous Pinter plays, special occasions – birthday parties,
homecomings–are not quite what they seem. At the other table, Russell begins, ‘They believe in me.’ When Suki replies a little later, ‘Listen. I believe you. Honestly. I do. No really, honestly,’ we know almost all we need to know about Russell’s lack of integrity; and when she completes her defining speech, ‘I want you to be rich so that you can buy me houses and panties and I’ll know that you really love me,’ she has laid bare a whole world of compromises and hypocrisies, while the one word ‘panties’ points to Russell’s infidelity. ‘Listen’, he counters, ‘she was just a secretary’, only for Suki to take the cue, ‘Like me.’ The implication lies on the table like a hand grenade, until Lambert recognizes her as a girl from his past. Two worlds, two registers. One apparently crass, predatory, wealth scarcely concealing the successful struggle for power, men and women behaving badly in public; the other controlled, suave, on-message, but equally lethal. The worlds, registers, rhythms, play alternately, but with increasingly matching themes. Betrayals, mistrust, lightly buried phobias, rise to the surface. One of Pinter’s most powerful effects is his ability to introduce other places and times, and other voices, into the dramatic world he has created, and to do this economically, unexpectedly, often poignantly. The most noticeable way, perhaps, is through memory, through the stories the characters tell, or imply, or invent. Lambert, the chief celebrant, shifts the raucous mood by a confessional memory, in a statement that follows, significantly as always in Pinter, a ‘Silence’: