The Birthday Party – Pinter in Fourteen Tweets

The Birthday Party – Pinter in Fourteen Tweets

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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19 February

The Birthday Party – Pinter in Fourteen Tweets

To Roland Clare
(for publishing abroad ‘The Macbeth Murder Mystery’¹, and thus Thurber's wider delights)

If one adopts the mindset of Prosecuting Counsel with Pinter :

1. Meg's having an affair with Stanley, keen to establish when Petey is home

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 19, 2017

4. With Petey gone, Stanley calls Meg 'a bad wife', but resists playfulness

5. He tells a menacing story, starting 'They're coming today'

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 19, 2017

8. When Goldberg and McCann come, Stanley says 'I didn't think they'd come', and (again) wants to know names

9. He tries to dissuade McCann

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 19, 2017

10. He claims that 'It's my chess night', apologizes to Stanley, and says that he'll 'try and get back early'

11. *He is not back in time*

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 19, 2017

12. She asks, 'Well... I mean... is there... a wheelbarrow in it ?'

13. With Stanley being taken to the car, Petey says 'Leave him alone !'

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 19, 2017

Actuated by Stanley / the affair, Petey - using an intermediary - commissioned Goldberg and McCann to remove Stanley :

He tries to back out

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 19, 2017

More likely 'an insurance policy', wanting Stanley to see him as distanced from what happened

Petey pretends to Meg that Stanley is asleep

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 19, 2017

He has Meg at the close, content that she believes, 'I was the belle of the ball'

Stanley's mum is 'In the sanatorium'

Now he is, too

QED

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 19, 2017

Postlude :

In The Caretaker, Davies' victimhood / psychiatric background are more evident - the intent of the brothers, Mick and Aston, rather less so. https://t.co/TVIK9OUa71

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 19, 2017

As to The Homecoming, where, at the end of the play, Teddy goes back to the States just with the injunction Don't become a stranger, from his wife Ruth : we are first surprised with the proposition (after Teddy's brother Lenny has said Why don't I take her up with me to Greek Street ?) from Max, her father-in-law, We'll put her on the game. That's a stroke of genius, that's a marvellous idea.

Except that Ruth, given that Teddy has not seemed very interested (or even surprised) that Lenny, and then Joey, go to bed with her, is then freely bargaining, with Max and her brothers-in-law, in such terms as You would have to regard your original outlay simply as a capital investment [sc. setting Ruth up in a flat with three rooms and a bathroom]... :

At night ('They haven't changed the lock'), Teddy arrives at his father's house with his wife Ruth - indifferent to what happens, at least ? https://t.co/TVIK9OUa71

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 19, 2017

In ‘Different Viewpoints in the Play’ (1982), an extract from his monograph Harold Pinter², Bernard F. Dekore suggests, on this point, Perhaps the devious Teddy did not introduce her to his family when they married but does so now because he expects to happen later when did not happen then.

Dekore goes on to say, If this is the reason for his homecoming, […] it could underlie Pinter’s statement (to John Lahr³) that ‘if ever there was a villain in the play, Teddy was it’ […]


End-notes :

¹ The piece first appeared in The New Yorker (p. 16 of the edition dated 2 October 1937), as linked here.

² In the Modern Dramatists series [Macmillan, London (1982)], and collected in the selection of critical essays Harold Pinter : The Birthday Party, The Caretaker and The Homecoming (ed. Michael Scott) (Macmillan, London (1986)).

³ ‘A Director’s Approach’ by Peter Hall, in A Casebook on Harold Pinter’s ‘The Homecoming’, p. 20 (ed. John Lahr) (New York, 1971).


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Deconstructing the tropical house

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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


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Too hot to handle ?

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23 July

* Contains spoilers *

The Hothouse is unmistakeable Pinter, and brings to mind what little I know of his political writings or late plays such as One for the Road, but I am unsure whether it needed a revival – or at least one that did not take greater risks with what dates back to the late 1950s, and was not staged by Pinter until more than twenty years later. (Perhaps the fact that, well before the end of the run, the expensive seats were available at a large discount is indicative of an answer, and the possibility that that trend may continue.)

What it did not need, at any rate, was Simon Russell Beale (Roote) turning the alacrity of a former colonel into too often huffing and gabbling the text, so that one word ran into the next – at the interval, I chose to try to establish whether the performance was representative by asking an usher at Trafalgar Studios, but he had not heard the first half, although he thought that people generally thought the delivery clear.

(I believe this to have been a misjudgement on Russell Beale’s part between a brisk characterization and audibility, because he performed Roote’s Christmas address fully in character and as if extemporized, but without compromising the careful detail of Pinter’s script.)

With this general exception, all of the cast was clear, and what stuck out for me was the beauty of execution and poise of the soliloquy given to Lush (John Heffernan), when he reports to Gibbs (John Simm) the visit of 6457’s mother. Taken out of context, and ignoring its exact content, the construction is pure Pinter, and Heffernan had the speech exactly right, as, I felt, he did Lush’s character (what’s in a name !*).

People such as 6457 we almost think that we must have seen, because Pinter gives an almost exact repetition between Gibbs and Roote of the guessing game where the latter tries to place what 6457 (and, later, 6459) looked like. Through Pinter’s stage-directions, we sense the unnamed inmates of this institution, but we are hardly allowed to feel them, because we are focused only on the staff (the lesser, ancillary staff are called the understaff).

This is where I come to what place The Hothouse (revised by Pinter when he staged it in 1980) has, and would set it against what we gather, without being anywhere near it, of the establishment in The Caretaker where Davies seems to have been given electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) : it all comes from Davies’ mouth, and it is truly and rivetingly distressing (the pun words ‘shocking’ and ‘electric’ first came to mind). We have Davies and we have his narration of this experience, and they seem to marry in a way that, perhaps, setting interactions between staff against that background does not.

In essence, The Hothouse is what we no longer expect from Pinter, a plot with a clear trajectory (even if there are puzzles along the way), which is not even a model that fits that well with The Birthday Party, a contemporary play. I think it is probably that he is doing too much (e.g. Roote’s diatribe against the patients being called by numbers, which turns out to be hot air, because he has no intention of trying to press for its being overturned), and ends up doing too little : with too little edge, as was maybe the case here, it can resemble a just slightly sinister version of Yes, Prime Minister.

Not to say that there is not power in scenes, such as the writing of the interrogation of Lamb (although not staged as Pinter appears to have envisaged) or the tightrope that Lush walks with Roote by challenging him about 6457 and 6459, but Lamb’s utterances to Miss Cutts point at that sort of inept bureaucracy, and even Roote is embroiled with rusty Ministry typewriters and the imperfections of the heating.

There is menace and tension if you know where to find it, but the work can be top heavy, driven by the situation, rather than, as in The Homecoming, the house being the backdrop to seeing the characters and watching them test each other. Simm I did not find right with his approach to Gibbs (Charlie, as Lush tries to call him), because, if Roote is a blusterer (as he surely is in the text), there has to be a little more to Gibbs than pedantry. After all, pedants do not necessarily of themselves make torturers, the thing that the ridiculously sex-driven Daisy Cutts (convincingly played by Indira Varma), always seeking to subvert or seduce into a lay, finds most exciting about Gibbs.

The Hothouse is casually set on Christmas Day – when that date in the calendar comes, I wonder how much this production will be remembered…


There is more here about the play, for those interested.



End-notes

* It may pass the observer by, but all of the names are monosyllables : Roote, Gibbs, Cutts, Lush, Lamb, Tubb, Lobb, Hogg. (The full list of the slain, given to Lobb by Gibbs, also has Beck, Budd, Tuck, Dodds, Tate and Pett.)


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Goldberg and McCann ride again

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17 April

I love everything that is old; old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines. -Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield
— Got Wine (@luv_wine) April 26, 2013

The pair who turn up and sometimes threaten more with innuendo, and what they don’t say rather than what they do, bear these names in Pinter’s The Birthday Party. The Homecoming has the unseen figure of MacGregor, who – so Sam claims at the close of the play – had Max’s wife in the back of the car as he drove.

In Old Times, the Gaelic name is McCabe, mentioned only in the sequences when Kate and Anna seem to inhabit another time and place – or another place and time to inhabit them. But who is McCabe ?

The play’s dialogue accustoms us to the possibility that, for example, we may never be sure whether it was Anna’s skirt that Deeley, with her compliance, looked up – or says that he did.

Anna’s eventually agreeing with him that it was she does not, in itself, signify that it did happen. Yet it does come immediately before Kate’s unleashing her fractured and furious speech about Deeley and Anna, with which the dialogue ends, and leads to the tableau with which it concludes.

The names McCann and McCabe share, to some extent, in euphony, but more so in the fact that they betoken an Irish, rather than a Scots, origin (on the rule that the prefix ‘Mc’ is one, and ‘Mac’ the other). If that rule is valid and if, as it seems, Deeley is an Irish name, could we posit that McCabe is really he ?

The Homecoming’s MacGregor is the only person not referred to by his or her Christian name or a pet form of it (Teddy, Lenny, etc., but just Ruth), although it is shortened to Mac. That pattern seems true in Old Times, because (in Act 2) the other names that Anna uses are Charley, Duncan and Christy – in Act 1, Anna had suggested Jake (whom Kate said that she does not like), or ‘Charley…or…’, and Anna then named McCabe, when Kate asks whom she meant.
Managing, the second time, to break in to whatever is happening between Anna and Kate again in Act 2, Deeley claims that Christy ‘can’t make it. He’s out of town’, and Kate says ‘Oh, what a pity’, before, after marking silence, the three talk together ‘normally’ again.

Prior to Deeley’s words, she feelingly and tellingly said about Christy (after saying that she liked him best, and Anna said that he is ‘lovely’) :

He’s so gentle, isn’t he ? And his humour. Hasn’t he got a lovely sense of humour ? And I think he’s…so sensitive. Why don’t you ask him round ?


Even a fondness and admiration for another man twenty years ago – or is it now ? – seems to have been too much for Deeley, too much of a threat, as Anna (after Deeley’s eruption) seems to perceive herself to be:

(To Deeley, quietly) I would like you to understand that I came here not to disrupt but to celebrate.

Pause

To celebrate a very old and treasured friendship, something that was forged between us long before you knew of our existence*.


The description of Christy does not seem to match Deeley’s nature and behaviour, and, with it, comes a portrayal of a time when men friends of Anna’s would be invited around, by Anna, to where Kate and she lived. (That is, if we believe the play’s opening dialogue to the effect that Kate had no friends other than Anna, and in the light of Anna’s saying Would you like me to ask someone over ?)

If he is not Deeley, McCabe is, at any rate, a mystery in Act 1 : in the scenario of the 1950s at its end, Kate says that she will think in the bath about Anna’s hesitant suggestion of asking McCabe, so not the definite rejection that Jake gets. Yet, by Act 2, we have :

Kate : Is Charley coming ?

Anna : I can ring him if you like.

Kate : What about McCabe ?

Anna : Do you really want to see anyone ?

Kate : I don’t think I like McCabe.

Anna : Nor do I.

Kate : He’s strange. He says some very strange things to me.

Anna : What things ?

Kate : Oh, all sorts of funny things.

Anna : I’ve never liked him.

Kate : Duncan’s nice though, isn’t he ?


As two women discussing men whom they know might, they turn briefly to Duncan, having more or less agreed that they do not like McCabe, and then to Christy, whereupon Deeley makes his successful interruption.

In context, then, is that intervention made in genuine fear, because he – McCabe – has heard himself rejected, and it seems that Christy might be asked to come to see Kate in his stead ?

Couple that with how Anna eventually validates Deeley for maintaining that he had a liaison with her**, and Kate’s words to Deeley about Anna’s feelings for him (events which he gives the impression of not quite remembering, not quite crediting, and which Anna does not even attempt to deny), and, with a consequence reminiscent of the unfolding of an Ibsen play, the trap has snapped shut.

For Anna, despite being the one for whom Deeley felt a real attraction, is not the one whom he chose to marry, and he had gone along with allowing Kate to efface the memory and reality of Anna :

He asked me once, at about that time, who had slept in that bed before him. I told him no one. No one at all.


That links back to when, just to Deeley, Anna had been denying his saying that they had had prior contact and having been at the party. Deeley said that afterwards

I never saw you again. You disappeared from the area. Perhaps you moved out..


In negating what Deeley proposes, Anna does not challenge him identifying her as that woman, but simply says No. I didn’t. Deeley then asks where Anna was, and, before he appears to drop the subject, she says Oh, at concerts, I should think, or the ballet.

By doing so, Anna lamely resuscitates the impression of a social whirl for Kate and her with which she launched herself into the play, whereas it seems just as plausible that, at some point, Anna’s world had revolved around The Wayfarers Tavern – despite her protestation I wasn’t rich, you know. I didn’t have money for alcohol., which Deeley rejects by saying that men, himself included, bought her drinks.

Knowing that Deeley is Kate’s husband, Anna maybe does not want to remember, and she does not appear able to parry Deeley’s claims now that he has her alone. He, for his part, almost certainly takes advantage, either of embellishing a real situation, or – if Pinter leaves us thinking it amounts to anything different – fabricating an account so far back that Anna cannot easily and definitely contradict him.

If Deeley is McCabe, any disappearance of Anna could not even be on a figurative level as Kate’s narration of Anna being dead or Anna’s of a man in the room who is sobbing and puts his head in Kate’s lap : that silent closing scenario, with the three of them, is like the dumbshow in Pericles or, more famously, in Hamlet, which sums up what dare not be spoken, but they know as truth, remembered truth.

In writing this, I find myself back at Beckettt’s Play, with Kate, Deeley and Anna linked as are his voices, doomed by an inextricable past…


Postlude

What a bastard relation to appreciating a play reading a text and thinking that one understands it is ! I say this, having just re-read Landscape, from 1968, and feeling an effect from it - an effect so different from a production, a performance, not least with Pinter, where the cumulative effect of the stage-directions Pause, Silence or even Long silence cannot be experienced on the page.

Such a crooked teaching that encouraged one to approach plays - and poems - as texts, when they are merely notated in writing, and live outside it !

My copy tells me that Peggy Ashcroft and Eric Porter were first broadcast on the radio in it, and then, in 1969, Peter Hall staged it (Ashcroft again, but not Porter). That figures. Is it conceivable that Pinter did not hear and know Beckettt's radio play Embers, broadcast first in 1959 ? And this play and also Silence, how they feed into the mood and nature of Old Times


End-notes

* Was the friendship, though, long before ?

** Of which he tells Kate, after telling alone Anna that this is his recollection, with the apparent intent of demeaning both Anna (for being the woman whose skirt he was allowed him to look up) and, by association, Kate herself for letting him become her husband when his interests were not in her, despite his story, with homoerotic mentions of Robert Newton, of meeting Kate at a screening of Odd Man Out.


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