A Pinter puzzle still unsolved Essay Example For Students

A Pinter puzzle still unsolved Essay The Roundabout Theatre Companys new mounting of Harold Pinters The Homecoming opened in New York last October just a few days after the tragicomic, hothouse confrontation between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. Suddenly, this once enigmatic play (routinely referred to in the late 60s as Pinters puzzle) seemed all too clear, almost didactically so. Ruth, the lone woman in the Homecoming, is involuntarily dragged into an all-male household, where three predatory members of the clan proceed to project upon her various male fantasies of womanhood: madonna and whore, earth mother and bitch goddess. In Anita Hills version of this story, only the fantasies were changed: spurned-woman-out-for-revenge, innocent dupe of Thomass political opponents, nut-case whose delusions were so powerful she could successfully negotiate a polygraph test. But the most compelling parallel between life and art was the role played in both by a nerdish character named Teddy: Pinters (as well as the Senate Judicia ry Committees) embodiment of detachment, ineffectuality and moral cowardice. It was as if The Homecoming had transformed before our eyes into one of those disease-of-the-week docudramas culled from the pages of People magazine. Of course, at the same time, it also felt as if Thomass confirmation hearings had been secretly scripted by Harold Pinter. As in: Who put the pubic hair on my Coke can? Is there a more Pinteresque moment anywhere in Pinter? All of the playwrights classic stategies were in evidence: the defamiliarizing of the commonplace, the sexualizing of objects, the verbal power plays, the territorial imperatives. Pinter, weve all been taught, is supposed to be about the weasel under the cocktail cabinet. But here, on the Senate committee, the weasels were very much out in the open: a Hatchetman named Orrin, the smarmy Specter of Arlen, and a Simpson considerably less benign than Bart. The Homecoming had never seemed timelier. And that was precisely the problem. Timeliness and relevance are ultimately impovershing to all great plays (and I believe that The Homecoming will prove to be the most enduringif not endearingof Pinters works). Such plays (we used to call them classics) always by definition transcend the period in which they were created. But thats because they simultaneously speak to and transcend every period, including the one in which theyre revived. Without an aura of strangeness and distance, great plays shrink in stature. They deliver only a quick fix that fades as fast as the headlines they momentarily, if powerfully, evoke. (Literature, as Ezra Pound once reminded us, is news that stays news.) So in approaching Pinters play we might bear in mind Andre Gides famous admonition to his eager admirers: Please, do not understand me too quickly. Where then does the problem lie? With the Roundabouts production? The Zeitgeist? The headlines? The play itself? Arguably, all of the above. But rather than assigning blame, Id prefer to raise a few questions that may help to clarify the nature of my complaint. Is the only problem that the Roundabouts production makes the play seem paaraphrasable, that it enables us all too easily to say what Pinters Puzzle is about (e.g., the objectification of women or something that sounds similarly fashionable)? Put differently: Should an ideal production of The Homecoming be infinitely more ambigous than this one? Not necessarily. For despite all the talk about puzzles and puzzlement, the most distinctive quality of the legendary Peter Hall/Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Homecoming that came to Broadway in 1967 was not its opaqueness or ambiguity, but rather its clarity, its concreteness and specificity. Not specificity of meaning, mind you but of sound and gesture, a palpable physicality which strongly suggested that any search for meaning would ultimately lead one back to the clean, sensuous surface of the production. For me, this was the theatre experience that best illustrated the wisdom of Susan Sontags then immensely influential essay, Against Interpretation. Transparence, wrote Sontag, is the highest, most liberating value in art. . . .Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are. And in her oft-quoted, aphoristic conclusion to the essay, she maintained, In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. But Sontags essay and Pinters play were written in the mid-1960s. Clearly, times have changed. Is it possible to ever again view this play the way we did then? The answer to that question is yesyou can go Homecoming again. That at least, was what I concluded after seeing Peter Halls 25th anniversay staging of Pinters play in London last spring. Perhaps the earth didnt move beneath my feet as it seemed to in 1967 when I saw the RSC production of the play in New York. But it convinced me that I hadnt been merely imagining, misremembering or embellishing things all these years. What I remembered deserved to be remebered as one of the three or four most formative experiences of a theatregoing life. In 1967, I was a precocious (maybe precious is the more accurate word) 18-year-old, determined to appear More Sophisticated Than Thou. My principal enthusiasms of the period included Alain Robbe-Grillets and Alain Resnaiss Last Year at Marienbad, Bergmans Persona, Antonionis Blownup, Andy Warhols silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe, the music of the Velvet Underground, the dances of Merce Cunningham and, of course, the essays of Sontag. Was there a place for the theatre in this celestial pantheon? Halls production of The Homecoming went a long way toward persuading me that the theatre might, on occasion, be able to hold its own alongside this cool, brainy, elegant company. The heart of Halls and Pinters strategy seemed to me to lie in Ruths response to the pseudo-philosophical bantering of Lenny and Teddy (e.g., Take a table. Philosophically speaking, what is it?). Lenny prattles on about this business of being and non-being, but Ruth emphasizes the palpability of the here and now. She may or may not speak for Pinter at this moment; but it seems to me that she affirmed (by physically embodying through speech and gesture) the very same values that distinguished this glacially elegant production as a whole: The Renaissance condition EssayLenny: Excuse me, shall I take the  ashtray out of your way? Ruth: Its not in my way. Lenny: It seems to be in the way of  your glass. The glass was about to fall.  Or the ashtray. Im rather worried  about the carpet. Its not me, its my  father. Hes obsessed with order and  clarity. He doesnt like mess. So, as I  dont believe youre smoking at the  moment, Im sure you wont object if I  move the ashtray. (He does so.) Lenny gets a laugh when he suggests that his father is obsessed with order and clarity: but the obsession he describes is evident nonetheless throughout the production. Given the fact that John Burys setting for the Hall production was so uncluttered to begin with, the ashtray and glass assumed an eerie prominence and intensityrather like the remaining pieces in the final moments of a championships chess match. Lenny continues the match as follows: Lenny: And now perhaps Ill relieve  you of your glass. Ruth: I havent quite finished. Lenny: Youve consumed quite  enough, in my opinion. Ruth: No, I havent. Lenny: quite sufficient, in my own  opinion. And then a few lines later: Lenny: Just give me the glass. Ruth: No. (Pause) Lenny: Ill take it, then. Ruth: If you take the glass. . .Ill take  you. Whether it was the moment when Lenny first invades Ruths private space by searching across her body for the ashtray, or the moment when Ruth decides to retaliate by pressing her hand firmly down on top of the glass, the blocking was wo cleanly chiseled that the results were positively sculptural. This was equally true of many other moments in Halls production: the stunning physical tableau at the end (Ruth sitting in the displaced patriarchs chair as he pathetically grovels on the floor, begging her for a kiss) or the scene in which Teddy, Ruths husband, is left holding her empty coat while she slow-dances with one of his brothers and then rolls on and off of the couch with another brother, or the precisely choreographed way in which the elderly uncle Sam collapses, presumably of a heart attack, toward the end of the play. These sequences were always realistic and yet strangely ritualized, as physically palpable as that glass of water, yet mysteriously reverberent, evoking distant ec hos of Lear, Oedipus and Greek tragedy. Ironically, Halls original production arrived at the very moment the American experimental theatre was becoming increasingly committed to a theatre of the body. (And as coincidence will have it, playing concurrently with Roundabouts revival of The Homecoming was a reconstruction at nearby La Mama ETC of Tom OHorgans production of Rochelle Owenss Futz, which also originally played in New York in 1967.) But the physical concreteness of The Homecoming was very different from the sort of physicality that informed the work of OHorgan, the Living Theater, the Open Theater or the Performance Group. The overtly choreographic stylization in a production like Futz was bodily with a vengeance, but it often bordered on group mine. And as a result, ones attention was ultimately deflected away from the body itself and onto what the body represented. In addition, much of this work was so determined to advertise the new freedom presumably offered by the liberated life of the body that it lacked the exacting physical discipline of Halls production. That sort of discipline was presumably at odds with the orgiastic and egalitarian ethos at the heart of so much of the company-created work of the period. So, paradoxically, at least for me, the most palpable and sensual theatre of the body was not to be found in the perpetual motion machines of Tom OHorgan (or for that matter, even in the work of Jerzy Crotowski) but in the unmistakably British collaboration of Harold Pinter, Peter Hall and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Critic Roger Copeland teaches at Oberlin College.