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

2.1 Body language in Pinter’s plays

In the millennium year, Harold Pinter reached his seventieth birthday. Looking back over his achievements (as actor, pacifist, playwright, poet, critic, director, creator-adaptor of scripts that have sensitively translated the artistry of novelists into the medium of film, campaigner for civil liberties and freedom of speech), one is astonished at the sheer range and variety of endeavour to which he has brought a focused and profound commitment. Yeats, whom Pinter has long admired and studied, comes to mind as possessing a similar protean sensibility, which held to the belief that all creativity is both deeply personal and assuredly political. Fittingly there comes to mind the imperative that occurs in one of the many poems, ‘An Acre of Grass’, in which Yeats addresses himself as an old man: ‘Myself must I remake’.1 There was to be no quiet putting-out to grass, no cosy retirement for him; rather Yeats envisaged questing after ‘frenzy’, the energetic, satirical rage and insight of Timon, Lear and the elderly William Blake or Michelangelo. It would be a new manifestation of himself and yet one wholly true to old forms; there would be no loss of integrity in this transforming process. To view the four volumes of Pinter’s Plays is to see manifold changes of subject matter, focus, linguistic register, conversational idiom, style and structure; yet the inspiring vision is always and uniquely recognisable as Pinter’s. Criticism has had to keep pace with those seeming changes of direction: since the late 1950s the plays have variously been claimed as fine examples of absurdism and of Freudian psychological theory applied to drama; they have undergone feminist revisioning and been championed for theirmeta-theatricality; and for the last decade they have been either praised or vilified for their confrontational political incisiveness. In consequence there has been a tendency to view the plays as falling into ‘periods’, which can be conveniently labelled: ‘comedies of menace’; ‘the memory plays’; ‘Pinter and politics’. Yet, as Michael Billington admirably argues throughout his biography of the dramatist,4 such categorising risks doing a disservice to the complexities of Pinter’s artistry: politics (social, sexual and familial) as powerfully shapes the action of the early plays as One for the Road (1984); and it is absurd to view the Absurdism of The Room (written, 1957), The Dumb Waiter (written, 1957), or The Birthday Party (staged, 1958) as devoid of political insight. Every new play by Pinter causes us to look afresh at all his earlier work; apparent changes in Pinter’s immediate thematic and stylistic preoccupations repeatedly appear on closer study to be developing qualities already present in previous plays; and so revivals are seen by reviewers as rediscoveries, as occasions for re-appraising seemingly familiar works in the light of the new. Generally, it may be said, artists need to create the taste by which their work will be enjoyed; but, amusingly in Pinter’s case, he seems continually to reshape the contexts within which his past work will be fully appreciated. Or one could reverse that proposition and claim that Pinter’s plays have always been ahead of their time (and not locked within it, as is fast proving the case with most of the works of his contemporary, John Osborne). Perhaps this is because, as in the art of his admired Yeats, Kafka, Webster and Swift, he can distil a clear-sighted, politicised horror (even at times, disgust) into metaphor, symbol and myth. He can shape a poetry from outrage with no loss in social precision. And that would seem as true of The Room as of Ashes to Ashes (1996). What new perspectives on Pinter’s drama have theatrical and critical contexts through the 1990s fostered? Or, to take the balancing proposition, what seemingly innovatory qualities have those changing contexts shown to be already latent within Pinter’s invention? What in his work has offered itself most recently for discovery and re-appraisal? The advent of physical theatre and concepts of physicalised performance in the 1990s coincided with (in part was the product of) developing theoretical formulations concerning the colonised and post-colonised body; the gendered, the feminist and the queer body; the politicised body; and the postmodern body. All these have taught us how to read both social and performing bodies and how to discriminate in the process between the performing and the performative; how to be alert to the individual body’s shaping under acculturating influences; how to determine the degree to which that body is constructed by external forces. Much of this theorising has developed to varying degrees from earlier critical preoccupation with the male gaze and its prescription of values by which the female body was to be presented for its pleasure and judgment; theories of the gaze deconstructed what was deemed a socially privileged method of control over women. Control over others, whether private or state-sanctioned, has of course been an on-going theme in Pinter’s work. It may seem perverse to write of the importance of body language in plays that formerly have chiefly been admired for their verbal artistry: their finely judged use of idiom; the disciplined rhythm, the pauses, silences, timing and pacing of lines like musical phrases, which build in such richard allen cave works as Old Times (1971) and No Man’s Land (1975) into structures of an almost symphonic complexity; the equally musical preoccupation with timbre in intimating subtextual complexities. Yet actors’ body language can equally well convey subtextual complexities (and do so in ways quite distinct from what may be read into the spatial relations between performers in a given playing space). If Pinter taught audiences in the 1990s to appreciate the importance of body language throughout the range of his plays, it is as much through his choosing to act in and direct revivals of his own earlier works as through new writing. Harold Pinter as actor especially has been a revelation.