Showing posts with label Harold Pinter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Harold Pinter. Show all posts

Wednesday, 16 September 2020

Comments on Pinter : Landscape (1968 / 1969) (work in progress)

Comments on Pinter : Landscape (1968 / 1969) (work in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

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.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday, 28 October 2019

The Shining (1980) : The #UCFF Tweets

The Shining (1980) : The #UCFF Tweets

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

28 October (one added, 16 December)
The Shining (1980) : The #UCFF Tweets










Post-script :







 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday, 6 April 2018

Mouth-music

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
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5 April




Mouth-music


 [For the Winter Solstice]


 I stand, and
(Having teased
Other lips) quiver
Now, 'twixt these
And your tongue -
Till I explode
Ambrosian gouts,
Thick and warm,
To savour
Sweetly down
© Copyright Belston Night Works 2018





Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday, 18 February 2017

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)













Postlude :




 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]... :



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).




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday, 1 January 2016

Mont Blanc Sings The Blues

This is a review of Alps (Alpeis) (2011)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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1 January

This is a review of Alps (Alpeis) (2011)

Not intending, in these first paragraphs, to tell the film, but indicate its significance, one can say that Alps (Alpeis) (2011) opens in the same place, and way, as it closes. Shortly afterwards, there are terrible, very specific threats made to the young gymnast whom we have seen performing (Ariane Labed¹), if she ever doubts again her coach’s (Johnny Vekris’) judgement that she is not ready to dance to pop yet. It is an overt and watchful assertion of assumed power (which is not directly challenged, but through underground measures of a certain naivety² – please see below).

Perhaps not best characterized to ourselves, in naturalistic terms, as the clumsy attempt of the coach, as an egocentric and proud man, to deal with losing face by putting the other three present in fear of reprisals – the fact that they are out of all proportion is the given undercurrent to what happens in this film : the ever-present possibility that one might be found to be in disfavour is what gives an edge of almost Pinteresque proportions to much of the dialogue.

Shortly after confronting the gymnast, the coach puts forward the fatuous suggestion that all four of them should collectively be Alps, and invites the others to say which one they want to be. As well as dealing straight off with the question of the title, this moment is a microcosm, as one chooses Monte Rosa (they are well versed in mountains), and so on. Maybe more by luck than judgement, this leaves him to stake a claim to Mont Blanc, and dominate by his comments about its – and so his – status.

One emphasis in what is expected of them, as with training the body in gymnastics to perform seamless and exact sequences of movements, is on repetition, on getting the words (one’s part) right, otherwise menaces have been made that may be realized – they may not be hanging offences, but we perceive that they could be hanging upside-down offences. Or can one buck the trend or current by pretending to comply² ? That is what Angeliki Papoulia – a nurse and the main character of the four whom we follow³ - tries, and one thing that she succeeds in doing is by buying, apparently through sex, the agreement of the ambulance man (Aris Servetalis) that the young gymnast should be allowed to perform to pop.


The idea and practice of play-acting goes back long before recorded Time, with European examples in the tradition of the Feast of Fools (especially in France) and The Lord of Misrule (also Abbot or King) in late-mediaeval and early-Tudor England. For some, in a film such as Holy Motors (2012), play-acting is something new (and not, heavily reliant on dazzling with what is little more than make-up and prosthetics, a slender conceit on which a whole film desires to found itself), whereas Alps takes it in its stride, and does not try hanging a film on it.)

What form play-acting takes in the film will not be told, but, as we start with a gymnast, one could think mysteriously in terms of a sporting substitution in a team game. The how and why of that, and the significance of who the substitute is, are what the film revolves at its heart, as is the continuing disquiet that the workplace is another nexus of domination : in a way that suggests menace, we hear an enquiry about coffee-mugs, where it seems that something less everyday and innocent is actually being talked about. More effective than The Lobster, for its opacity and lasting registration in the memory, Alps challenges as the best of cinema, theatre and prose can.




End-notes

¹ She also appears in The Lobster (2015), which this film’s director, Yorgos Lanthimos, likewise co-wrote with Efthymis Filippou.

² Which The Lobster¹ makes an even larger part of its remit.

³ Although this blog’s review of The Lobster effectively suggests that we may be mistaken about the person whom we are following, there is the same principle there as to the point of view in the film’s being predominantly one person’s.





Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday, 15 September 2014

Camera Catalonia at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 Part I : Q&A with Mar Coll, director and co-writer of We All Want What's Best For Her (2013)



More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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15 September

Summary account of a Q&A at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 with Mar Coll, director and co-writer of We All Want What’s Best For Her (Tots volem il millor per a ella) (2013)


* Contains spoilers *

As detail fades already, this is necessarily an impressionistic account of a Q&A that followed the second screening, at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (#CamFF), of We All Want What’s Best For Her (Tots volem il millor per a ella) (2013) with director and co-writer Mar Coll, and hosted by the curator of Camera Catalonia (for the third year running), Ramon Lamarca, at 1.00 p.m. on Friday 5 September


Next on the blog (the 1,000th posting), a write-up of Q&A2 from @camfilmfest with Mar Coll, director of We All Want What's Best For Her...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 13, 2014


The first screening of We All Want What’s Best For Her at Cambridge Film Festival, at 6.15 p.m. on Thursday 4 September, had been a UK premiere and so was also followed by a Q&A*.


Ramon Lamarca and Mar Coll at Festival Central - image courtesy of Tom Catchesides


To judge only by the end of that previous Q&A, this second one maybe gave a little too much weight to the question of Geni’s character (played beautifully by Nora Navas**) being a woman. That said, Ramon has since indicated that, because Birds Eye View is interested in and for exploring issues of gender and society (in relation to film-making), they had been very present in the discussion on Thursday evening – some might therefore be coincidentally interested in the following Tweet :



The reason for asking about Geni’s gender is that the main friend, on whom the film’s handling of the topic of recovery Mar Coll and her co-writer had based the premise, was a man called Eugènio (hence Eugènia, shortened to Geni) – maybe one of those slightly irritating facts that everyone wrongly thinks that they are alone in having heard and then so many people ask about it…

In fact, Mar did not think that it would have made much / any difference for Geni’s character to have stayed as a man (and, unfortunately, the reason that she gave for making the change has not registered mentally). [However, one is – only slightly – reminded of Cambridge Film Festival 2011, and confronting British actor and first-time director Paddy Considine with the possibility of such a reversal in his Tyrannosaur (2011), i.e. the idea of Peter Mullan’s character Joseph switching, say by becoming Josephine, with that of the now-everywhere Olivia Colman, so that we have a battered man (they exist), rather than a battered woman…]

For those who had seen Mar’s film before, this repeat screening was an opportunity to notice that, however ambiguously (and, of course, fully deliberately so) the question of paying the taxi-driver may have been left, we do not see Geni’s wedding ring after when she decided (after a hesitation) to leave it with him as a ransom,: the driver has been mean to her, and could she – on some level – have been acknowledging her husband Dani’s own meanness and have been making a symbolic sacrifice ? (For example, we soon see Dani (Pau Durà) criticizing Geni for stumbling in her speech, not talking in full sentences because she is upset, and how he patronizingly cajoles her, whilst all the time calling her ‘babe’.)

Mar acknowledged the possibility (which another audience member thought might even have been at the subconscious level of a Freudian slip) that parting with the ring is symbolic : as expected in the best of film-making, Mar wants the viewer to conclude what he or she thinks happened before / is happening on screen. (So when, after the Q&A, it was briefly mentioned that maybe Geni senses that Dani is attracted to Geni’s sister Raquel (Àgata Roca***), and perhaps has even been having an affair with her, Mar just agreed about the attraction, and left the rest as a possibility**** (although it is consistent with Dani’s lack of arousal when Geni, feeling close to him, tries to initiate sex on her return home, if he had been with Raquel earlier.))


Portrait of Mar Coll by, and image courtesy of, Tom Catchesides (@TomCatchesides)


As to future projects, Mar tempted us with mention of an exploration that she is doing with a group of film students, working on an adaptation of a Pinter play, and which your correspondent established to be Betrayal. When Mar asked, many of us knew the play, even the Jeremy Irons / Ben Kingsley / Patricia Hodge film (which Mar indicated that she was less keen on), so that sounds something to look forward to…


To come (when time / energies permit) : transcript / write-up of a interview that Mar Coll kindly gave about the film and its main character…

In the meantime, this is a link to a pre-Festival review (written with the kind assistance of Ramon, the producers of the film, and the Festival), which this account of the Q&A, and, in due course, the interview are intended to amplify (as the review had consciously been of a non-spoilery nature)


End-notes

* At which Tom Catchesides’ (@TomCatchesides’) striking double portrait of Mar and Ramon was taken, when Ramon interviewed Mar (together with Birds Eye View) :


** Whom we had seen before, in the Catalan strand at the Festival in 2012, as the mother in Black Bread (Pa negre) (2010).

*** Whom we also saw during the Catalan strand two years ago, in V.O.S. (2009), and also this year in Camera Catalonia, in the same director’s (Cesc Gay’s) earlier Fiction (Ficció) (2006), which screened at 2.30 p.m. on Saturday 6 September – review to come...

**** At Enric’s – Geni and Raquel’s father’s – lunch-table, we seem to gather that Dani and Raquel knew / shared with each other at university, which strengthens the parallel drawn in the review with that wonderful predecessor Hannah and Her Sisters (1986).

Mar was pleased with that link, and also with having spotted the design influence of Allen’s earlier, neglected drama Interiors (1978) (for making which he had to endure such criticism, even abuse, because it was a drama, not comedy :

A style of film to which, after Match Point (2005) and Cassandra’s Dream (2007) (a review that, implausibly, has more than 10,000 page-views on the blog…), he has only fully returned to great acclaim, in Blue Jasmine (2013).)




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Wednesday, 24 July 2013

Deconstructing the tropical house

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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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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Wednesday, 17 April 2013

Goldberg and McCann ride again

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

17 April



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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Monday, 8 April 2013

Kristin at the Harold Pinter Theatre II

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

8 April

In the last performance of Old Times at The Harold Pinter Theatre (formerly The Comedy, and home to nine or so previous Pinter productions), I saw Lia Williams as Kate (Deeley’s wife), and therefore Kristin Scott Thomas as Anna (Kate’s friend) (Rufus Sewell was Deeley).

I was partly encouraged to do so by what Lia had said to me at the stage door before Easter, when she had come off stage from being Anna : that Kristin and she looked very different, and that, with her dark wig, I wouldn’t recognize her. It sounded fascinating for these very clear portrayals one way around to swap over, and for Kristin to be not ‘dark’ as Anna, as the opening word of the play would have her, but blonde, and to imbue the other woman with character, form, shape…

This way around, the play was different from the start : KST was standing, as Lia had done (according to the stage directions), looking out of the window at the back, but she was audience right, not left, and Lia, on the sofa, was on the one audience left, not the other. As the interaction between Deeley and Kate proceeds, the gestures, the blocking of the two on and around the stage, were quite different, not mere mirror-images*, and, as I made comparisons, I contemplated that memorizing the roles, even for Rufus, would be made more distinct by such partitioning, lest (a word that Deeley thinks not often heard) he should suddenly mistake Kate for Anna, or vice versa.

At the moment when the text directs Anna to turn ‘from the window, speaking’, the full presence of Kristin burst onto the stage. Knowing the play anyway, it had been a striking moment with Lia, but it was if suddenly she had always been in the room. Her movement, her energy, her grace were fantastic, and the relief in which Lia’s Anna was cast enlivened one’s appreciation of what they each had done – this suited KST down to the ground, the enthusiasm tempered by, but seeking to cover, the uncertainty that Deeley seeks to exploit by his interjections.

Sewell seemed a different Deeley, hard to characterize, but maybe a bit more bluff at the outset, a little more active on his feet, but no less drawing attention to himself when (as he did in both versions) he leant forward, put his mouth to the brandy-glass, and, in one swift bending move backwards, downed a very good measure, before trotting over, naughtily, to the brandy bottle.

As the sort of man that he is, wanting to stress how travelled he is, how much he enjoys his job and how important it is, this larger-than-life Salmon Fishing in the Yemen sort of woman (KST’s role in it, that is) is a threat to him – that is, at any rate, how he responds to her, trying to knock holes in her recollections, what she says her life in Sicily is like, etc. KST’s Anna stood up very well to this treatment, not by ignoring it, but by posture, movement, expression, and she got, by it, the lion’s share of the laughs that were not already on the face of the script.

It is clear enough to me, more so as I think back on Saturday night, that the tailoring of how Lia and Kristin played each part, and how their Rufus responded to them, must have been worked out in wonderful detail all along. What a marvellous piece of theatre to have gone to such trouble to create the play twice over to fit with this fascinating experiment of switching over !

Lia’s Kate was, I guess, much more how I tried to imagine her when I first devoured Pinter plays in several afternoons at the time of studying The Caretaker for ‘A’ level, that acquisitive sort of juvenile desire to know as much as possible about something (thankfully, not from the Internet, then, but from Pinter’s own words, though largely not words enacted on stage or screen) : she lived that sort of distance, that inwardness of Kate that makes her awkward, makes them, much as the bare situation invites it, end up talking about her in the third person.

That feature of the play, both when Deeley is first seeking information about Kate (following Anna’s exuberance about the lives / life that she says that they lived in London), and in the time when, after Kate has gone for her bath, they have moved together for Deeley to show Anna the bedroom, is more than just a feature : it is the bedrock that both are drawn to use Kate as the only thing that they have in common, whether as offensive gesture or defence, and to propound the Kate that they assert that they know, however much at odds with that of the other.

Lia’s Kate seems to invite being fought over in a quite other way from that of Kristin – Kristin was quiet, as Kate has to be in words when they are allocated to the other two, but not in a way that did not let us into her movements, expressions, smiles, be they only the adjustment of a limb, a calmness of the face, or the radiance of her pleasure. Lia, by contrast, had a more stark take on Kate, one that burnt oh so slowly right up to the final sets of blocks of words that she delivers to close the dialogue.

That approach seemed to work better as what Woody Allen would always have described as a ‘passive aggressive’ interpretation, but, at the same time, Kristin came to those utterances from a different place, and so, perhaps, we were more shocked by these words*, and the sense of enigma had a contrasting origin :

But I remember you. I remember you dead.


It is quite apparent to me that the play can unfold in very unlike ways, and yet still be close to the conception of the text, and not, I suspect, exhaust it.

More here on what seeing this production twice now makes me believe…


End-notes

* In the first viewing of the play, before the tableau, Anna (Lia) is at the foot of the bed that is audience left, after being pushed off the end by Kate, whereas Lia’s Kate stood over Anna.

** Just after Anna has said to Deeley :

Oh, it was my skirt. It was me. I remember your look… very well. I remember you well.


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Saturday, 23 March 2013

Kristin at the Harold Pinter Theatre I

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

24 March

I admit that I went to see Old Times, not because of Rufus Sewell, or because of Lia Williams, but Kristin Scott Thomas, who played Emma so beautifully in the same director’s, Ian Rickson’s, production a few years ago (since when The Comedy has become The Harold Pinter Theatre). (Quite apart, even if IMDb ratings disagree, from her striking roles in In Your Hands (2010), Leaving (2009), In Your Hands (2010), The Woman in the Fifth (2011), and I’ve Loved You So Long (2008)*.)

I have seen this play before, and the role of Kate has its difficulties. Moreover, Williams and she have their work cut out by a schedule that has them alternating who will play it, and who her friend Anna, from one performance to another – even, when there is a matinee, within one day, and, on a few days, ‘the actresses playing the roles of Kate and Anna will be decided on the night of the performance with a coin toss’ ! I’m not sure whether it’s gimmickry, but it will have me seeking a time to see KST as Anna.

Anna is the part that Pinter’s first wife, Vivien Merchant**, played – I knew that she had appeared in it, her last of his, but had assumed / misremembered her being Kate – and, to my eye, there are facial similarities between her and KST. (Likewise, I found a still of Pinter appearing in the play as Deeley, and his Kate was Nicola Pagett.) Getting back to the actresses swapping the roles, they obviously aren’t a pair, being mistaken one for the other, in the way of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but it is an interesting thing for the freshness, the dynamics, of the staging to do it.

Talking, before the performance, to some people sitting near me, I explained about how Old Times confuses or blends memory, imagination and reality, and how alliances are tacitly proposed by one to another against the third. However, they shift, so that the characters also employ challenges to each other’s recollection, status, even the words that they use, and sometimes outright intimidate. These skeletal remembrances of my last encounter with the play were to hand, but not, even if it had been wanted, the detail of the unfolding.

Afterwards, waiting at the stage door, I talked to a couple who had not known the play before, but read good reviews, knew some of the films, and wanted to see KST. As we chatted about it, there was a convenient centre-ground that what really happened is down to interpretation***, resulting from my clarifying that the silent tableau acted out at the end is what Anna told us about earlier, with the unknown man in Kate's and her shared room, and his head in Kate's lap, etc.****.

As our discussion progressed, the intriguing suggestion arose that Kate and Anna are perhaps the same person : what if they were, with the visit of Anna as some sort of psychological way of interpreting the things in Kate that Deeley could relate to better, if she took the form of Anna ? The play was first put on in 1971, and Pinter had had that affair with Bakewell in the decade before, so maybe he knew all about, as the case might be, splitting up his affections between two women, or having a publicly visible wife and another with whom he had an unacknowledged intimacy.

If so, I cannot see the situation with Merchant, Pinter and Bakewell, although credited as the origins of the later play Betrayal, being any more than the germ of it or (of Old Times) : this is not Pinter working out his angst and anguish, and actually puts me more in mind of Beckettt’s aptly titled Play, another two women and a man, seemingly being tortured or interrogated about their past. Play was from 1963, and Beckettt and Pinter not only knew each other, but were friends (with a shared love of cricket, too).

The text supports this notion, because, at the close of a long speech towards the end of Act Two, Deeley says (talking to Kate about Anna) :

She thought she was you, said little, so little. Maybe she was you. Maybe it was you, having coffee with me, saying little, so little.


He wants both women, now as then (if there really ever was a then), so much is clear, and there he resembles Man in Play. Beckettt achieves a distillation of the essence of an affair by having the three voices speak parts of each of their story, one at a time and seemingly unaware of the others, literally disembodied (they are in urns), and, in the way that they are presented to us as spirits, compelled for eternity to tell their wrongs, they remind of the Inferno of Dante (beloved of Beckettt). In Pinter’s play, he muses on the uncertainties of memory, of identity, of remembering – or thinking to remember – another person and / or an event, and this production does justice to that aim.

I have already mentioned that Kate is on stage often enough with nothing to do. Scott Thomas did this perfectly, embodying this Kate who gets talked about, and who seems, if not other worldly, sometimes a bit emotionally distant – so much more dramatically stirring the flare-up, when she talks, in several chunks of text separated by silences and pauses, about Anna (who has no further words in the script), seems to gel with this notion that Anna is no more than she, killed off by having Deeley come to her room.

But perhaps Deeley, too, is Anna / Deeley, because Kate first describes Anna :

Your face was dirty. You lay dead, your face scrawled with dirt, all kinds of earnest inscriptions, but unblotted, so that they had run, all over your face, down to your throat.


Then, after a pause marked, in the same speech, she continues addressing Anna, but talks about Deeley :

I dug about in the windowbox, where you had planted our pretty pansies, scooped, filled the bowl, and plastered his face with dirt. He was bemused, aghast, resisted, resisted with force. He would not let me dirty his face, or smudge it, he wouldn’t let me.


The unclean face, the repetition of ‘dirty’ (albeit as a verb), and the vivid reminder of the description of Anna’s in ‘smudge’, they all suggest some link. Anna is said to be ‘lying dead’, with its finality, and Deeley’s response in the immediately succeeding words, proposes a solution to Anna and being in London (the explanation of the apparent opening present day) :

He suggested a wedding instead, and a change of environment.

Slight pause

Neither mattered.


The succeeding, closing words of the play, still from Kate, amount to a denial of Anna’s ever having existed :

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


There has been a fair amount of barbed comment from Deeley to her, such as this exchange (about Anna’s possibly fanciful claims regarding her home and husband) :

Anna : He’s not a vegetarian. In fact he’s something of a gourmet. We live in a rather fine villa and have done so for many years. It’s very high up, on the cliffs.

Deeley : You eat well up there, eh ?

Anna : I would say so, yes.


Kate related (if Anna weren’t the side of Kate that she killed to become Deeley’s wife) Anna being dead, then, in almost magically-sounding way abouttaking Deeley to where she lived, ‘When I brought him into the room your body of course had gone’, then putting on his face, and his proposal : Deeley has substituted for / become Anna.

Seen from his perspective, the closing tableau of a sobbing Deeley, seeking attention or comfort from the women in turn, then, as Kate sits on her bed and Anna lies on hers, sitting in the armchair embodies a possible, but difficult, choice between the quiet Kate, who likes to go for walks, and the Anna who says (again, not convincingly) that she likes parties, the Tate and concerts.

As if as a provocation to Deeley, who claims to have been watching a film in an empty cinema in when he first saw Kate and spoke to her outside, Anna asserts that Kate hustled her out to ‘some totally unfamiliar district and, almost alone, saw a wonderful film called Odd Man Out’(the same film). After these words, a silence is marked, and then Deeley abruptly says ‘Yes, I do quite a bit of travelling in my job’, which Sewell reinforced by an angry look at Anna and tone.

We will never know what is going on amongst this apparent three any more than they, if they are three, do themselves, or what Deeley’s job and travelling are really about. As with all good art, what matters is how this play makes us think about what we see, remembering what Anna said :

There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened. There are things I remember which may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place.


Three slight hesitations with the performance. First, when Deeley takes a second brandy, what Sewell is (meant to be) doing with his gyrations across the sofa on which Anna is sitting from behind it was beyond me. Later, I felt that he allowed the pace to go a little too slack in, I think, the long speech where he confuses the women, or in a sustained exchange with one of the others, when he is centre stage. And, finally, there is supposed to be a long silence, after lying across Kate’s lap, and before very slowly sitting up (the sitting up was not slow either), but that may be Rickson’s direction.


Now on the blog : when KST played Anna instead


End-notes

* I throw a veil over Bel Ami (2012), not because KST isn’t good, but because she had been miscast as an older woman, who, through childlike desire and infatuation, gains a glow of someone more the real age of the actress.

** Curiously, to judge from the write-up of Pinter in the back pages of the programme, you’d have thought that he lived with Antonia Fraser for a while before marrying her, not that he’d already been married and a father, let alone had an affair with Joan Bakewell…

*** Perhaps one of the starting-points for Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen, precisely about interpretation, with (in the production that I saw) another three characters, Nils Bohr, his wife, and Werner Heisenberg, circling each other - and their relationships - like particles in an atom.

**** That speech, in context, shows what I first thought about the play when I read it, because there are pages of script leading up this point when just Deeley and Anna are talking (usually about Kate), and some stage business is needed for the listening Kate. (Between them, Rickson and Scott Thomas (and, no doubt, Williams) did this immensely well.) As she remarks, it’s almost as if she is dead or cannot hear them, an intensified form of what happens – as here – when some long-lost friend of one partner is being asked by the other what he or she was like then.


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