Comments on Pinter : Landscape (1968 / 1969) (work in progress)
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15 September
Comments on Pinter : Landscape (1968 / 1969) (work in progress)
1. A woman (Beth) is being reflective about both the past, and herself and her qualities, in relation to it.
2. Pinter may not have intended this play for radio, but it was first given there by the BBC¹. Has that earlier identity as - one might think of it - 'a play for voices' been subsumed since Peter Hall, within months of that first production, directed it (alongside Silence) at the RSC ?
3. Peggy Ashcroft played Beth in both productions, Dorothy Tutin in the BBC production directed by Kenneth Ives in 1983 (with Colin Blakely as Duff).
4. The title evokes :
(i) The outside, which the man (Duff) and she largely 'live in' while speaking ;
(ii) The 'landscape of their lives' as a terrain (minefield ?) that they physically, and mentally, occupy ; and
(iii) Who they are (or were) in relation to it - and, through it, to each other.
5. It is also a clue to the word 'rape', which is not at all far from the surface - here, in the short Night¹, or in The Collection (1961 / 1962²).
6. What Duff gives with one hand (That nice blue dress he [Mr Sykes] chose for you, for the house, that was very nice of him), he takes with the other³ (Of course it was in his own interests to see that you were attractively dressed about the house, to give a good impression to his guests) : in the latter, he is arguably as much trying to make facts suit him as needle Beth (again) about her worth.
7. Beth does not need, or does / can not benefit from, his version of encouragement (You should have a walk with me one day down to the pond, bring some bread. There's nothing to stop you.) or, more significantly, his of approbation :
Mr Sykes took to us from the very first interview, didn't he ?
Pause
He said I've got the feeling you'll make a very good team. Do you remember ? And that's what we proved to be. No question. [...]
8. [...]
9. When Beth sets out 'the basic principles of shadow and light' (Shadow is deprivation of light, etc.), we know, of course, that she means something else - as well as telling us, she is seeking comfort, by relating them to herself and to her past, to who she is :
But I always bore in mind the basic principles of drawing.
Pause
So that I never lost track. Or heart.
Pause
[...]
End-notes :
¹ On 25 April 1968 and 2 July 1969, according to the information in the Eyre Methuen edition Landscape and Silence (A Methuen Modern Play), which includes the text of Night, first performed on 9 April 1969.
² Another play that, again according to its Methuen edition, was first presented elsewhere than on the stage (on Associated Rediffusion Television on 11 May 1961).
³ Duff had done so, straightaway in the next sentence, with ?, but 'cannot let it lie' - he has to worry it, because, unspoken, it worries him.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
