More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
24 July
I must make time to look at Michael Billington’s book about Pinter, and see what light he sheds on :
* How the play came to be written (what was ‘in the air’, and in Pinter’s thoughts, a decade after Nineteen Eighty-Four)
* What Pinter thought of it at the time - in particular, what led him ‘to shelve it’
* Whether anyone (Pinter included) read the play in that time
* What brought Pinter to go back to the play and to stage it (e.g. was there any response to Thatcherism and the cynical creed of personal advancement ?)
* Whenever the t.v. version was, whether Pinter was involved and what he thought
* What he thought of the play afterwards, both after it had been staged and on t.v.
* Contains spoilers *
The play leaves relatively little to the imagination, except ‘the patients’, although we have some sort of ‘description’ of 6457 and 6459 from Roote and Gibbs’ paired question-and-answer sessions, and we also gauge the nature of the establishment from Lush’s account of what he said to 6457’s mother. However, the greatest direct insight, coming from Cutts and Roote’s final time together, is of her account of being friends with 6459, because, although Roote mouths off to Gibbs in Act One about calling the patients numbers when they have names, he is not going to rock the boat.
The greatest implication is that the type of ‘experiment’ that Gibbs, with the assistance of Cutts, carries out on Lamb, whether or not it is meant to be (and so is part of the official work of this ‘rest home’, as Lush calls it), must be one to which the patients, too, are subjected. Has Gibbs – whose affect is distinctly on ‘the cool side’ and indicative of sociopathy – set up this soundproofed room off his own bat, or was he drawn to work at this place because of what it does ?
It is chicken and egg, as so often with Pinter’s characters. For example, Lenny’s intimidatory speech to Ruth in The Homecoming about the woman whom he encounters at the canal : does he use the language of violence and make threats because of who he is, or has behaving in that way partly made him that sort of person ? And, of course, one is reminded of The Birthday Party.
When Goldberg and McCann catch up with their prey Stanley at the boarding-house, the two-headed interrogation game that they play with him has a strong resemblance to Lamb’s at the hands of Cutts and Gibbs, so small wonder that the plays come from the same time. As far as I recollect, apart from some possible hints of a background in a gang to Stanley’s involvement with them and in trying to make an exit (there is a clear sense of obligation, of having broken the rules), we are neatly told relatively little, but we have a sense of an organization, of people having – or taking – power over others.
A similar world to that of Roote and Gibbs, but with the authority of the Ministry : however, towards the end of Act Two, there is the curious objection, by Lush, to Roote’s calling himself ‘a delegate’, and the furious and violent insistence by Roote that he is one). Did Pinter perhaps think this play too political, with the idea of State-sanctioned torture, and sublimate it into the shadowy world that descends on Stanley, with the suggestion that he is not an innocent, whether or not ‘the patients’ are, or are meant to be ?
And there is the big rub. We have Gibbs’ self-motivated account of what he says that Roote did to incense the inmates to murder the staff (himself excepted), but Pinter is, nonetheless, suggesting that these ‘patients’ would, given the opportunity, do so. What message is he conveying about those who have been incarcerated, their dangerousness, whether we think them political prisoners or some category of those with mental-health conditions ?
Whoever they may be, by making them a deus ex machina for wiping out the regime that stands in Gibbs’ way (including the clinging Cutts, who is clearly irritating to him and his outlook), he denigrates them as a force of destruction – yes, we have the keening, the sighs, the laughs that recur, but this onslaught of murder is not exactly justice, does not have a retributive effect as, say, might The Furies in Greek tragedy, because they are contained and confined again, and Gibbs will be head of this place, which scarcely promises to be a more humane rulership.
In terms of the rest of the structure of the play, we know that Roote once stood in relation to his predecessor, whom he hesitates to say ‘retired’, as Gibbs does now to him. We know also that Lamb had a predecessor (about whom he has found nothing), but Cutts and Gibbs claim that they know no more about him that that he is no longer there (although he helped them as Lamb is about to, they say).
Two questionable terminations of employment, plus a chief, in Roote, who throws whisky over Lush as well as kicking him repeatedly. Cutts is urging Gibbs to kill Roote, Gibbs has a knife and so does Lush, who, when they both produce them, resemble thugs. Roote, with his intervening bayonet, is a sort of Max, breaking up a fight at home between his sons.
Did Pinter sublimate that sense of the staff turning on their own (looking for someone to blame for 6459’s pregnancy, a victim) into the two men who track down Stanley, and prefer a drama with that mode of expression, of a few characters representing something shadowy that is bigger ? It is arguable that it is a better vehicle, because otherwise we end up with Gibbs’ rise to power, giving a story to Lobb that no one is alive to contradict.
We can look for the drama in the horrific tableau of a catatonic Lamb, still in the experimental chair, but I do not feel that it is there with the impact of wrapping up what the play might be about. Nothing makes us realize that there is a whole unseen world beyond Lamb being tortured (the sacrificial lamb is surely no coincidence) – of who else has been, and of what this place is for. My response is that, rather, it brings us too much to focus on the greasy pole and on the individual ruthlessness of Gibbs, as a type of Steerpike, hungry for power at any cost.
The dimension of shock at the ghastliness of State-sponsored inhumanity is too latent, too built into the infrastructure of the place as a given – and whose continuation, with ‘reinforcements’ (with all that word’s connotations) supplied to Gibbs by Lobb, is assured.
This follows on from a review of the play in production
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
No comments:
Post a Comment