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Directing Harold Pinter's Plays
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Peter Hall |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Harold Pinter is one of the world's  leading contemporary dramatists, and is also highly regarded as a successful director and actor. Therefore, for another to direct his work well must be, in a sense, doubly challenging. It is a challenge which Peter Hall has risen to admirably, having memorably directed many of Pinter's plays. In this extract from his contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter, he discusses the pleasures of directing Pinter. |
 distinguished dramatist once surprised me by lamenting the plight of Harold Pinter. 'All other dramatists', he announced, 'can go off and write any type of play they please--farce or history, polemic or romance. But Harold Pinter has to write a Harold Pinter play. It must be hell for him.' |
This was an affectionate joke, but a joke which expressed a truth. Pinter's plays are instantly recognisable and particular. 'Pinteresque' is a word that has entered the language. His voice--whether it be combative cockney, or expressing the unexpected associations and leaps of memory--is very much his own. His content--the unknown threat, the confrontation in the confined space, whether it be territorial, or the personal tensions of the subconscious--has hardly changed in forty-five years. The threats have always been political, metaphors of power. Pinter is the champion of tolerance and compassion in the brutal jungle of life, the seeker after clarity in the confusions of memory. |
The presence of imminent violence, of a breakdown bound to happen, haunts all his plays. Speech is at cross-purposes and combative; charm is possessive; concern contains a hidden mockery; even love is often a violation. But all these threats are subtle--never palpable. Above all, they are ambiguous. Tension may finally explode when a man's head is split open by a blow from a walking-stick. But before this, the demands of social conduct have been observed in their full contradictions. To mock someone, to take them on, only scores points if the hatred is disguised with charm, and the hostility with wit. The victim must never be sure that the antagonist is his enemy. |
Perfect credibility
In his early years, Pinter was often categorised as part of the Theatre of the Absurd. Nothing could be more misleading. The absurdists (and Ionesco remains their leading exponent) sought to illuminate by incongruous juxtapositions or improbable shocks--which were usually justified by a grain of truth. But Pinter in comparison has always been truth itself. Underneath his confrontations, hidden in the enigmas of the back-stories of his plays, there is always a perfectly credible and recognisable pattern of human behaviour. It may be disguised (it usually is), but beneath all the ambiguities is something utterly coherent and lifelike. Yet it is never obvious; audiences delight in unravelling puzzles. |
A Pinter play confronts us as dispassionately as the mask of Greek drama. The enigmatic expression is neither sad nor cheerful, because it is both. Once the text is heard against it, it becomes tragic or comic by turns. Play and mask have an apparent calm that hides a turbulent and passionate emotional life which may erupt at any moment. What is hidden is felt by the audience, even though it may never be revealed. It remains one of the particular miracles of live theatre that this instinctive communication is always present. An audience can therefore sense what an actor is feeling, without the actor having to show that feeling. But the inner feeling must be specific and true. He must experience it, even though it does not need to be stated or revealed. Paradoxically, the mask does not hide, it exposes. So does the play. |
So while directing Pinter is always about preserving ambiguity--in performance, set, costume, action--and only rarely showing emotion, directors and actors must always know very clearly what they are hiding. Ambiguity can never mean not knowing. |
All dramatists are vulnerable to their directors; but since the text remains for other directors to interpret later, the written word is finally preserved. But Pinter's plays, like Beckett's (because both contain such rich under-texts, and what is said is rarely what is meant), are particularly susceptible to vagueness and generalisation. On the stage this leads easily to pretension, and sometimes to absurdity. If an actor observes a Pinter pause without deciding why it is there and what hidden process is going on inside him, then the result can be a pretentious moment that leads to the wrong kind of laughter. |
Similarly, the director must be even-handed with his audience and take care that the enigmas that are at the heart of every Pinter play are clearly presented. The audiences must be able to construct their own view of the past. Once the audience have pieced the story together, they can judge it. They may come to slightly different conclusions as they consider, for instance, what happened in Leeds in The Collection. There is often no certainty about memory, and even no absolutes concerning truth. So a director who tells the back-story, so that there is no room for interpretation or for ambiguity, may have simplified the play and betrayed his author. He must present all the evidence dispassionately. But above all, he must avoid making a statement. |
Preserving ambiguity
This is frequently a difficult task. One of my chief memories of directing Pinter is weighing the dramatist's frequent, anxious question: 'Isn't that a bit of a statement that you are making?' The revelations in the plays come slowly and must be handled delicately. This is a world of secrets, where past actions are constantly reconsidered and revalued. Above all, in the plays of the great middle period (The Homecoming and Old Times through to Betrayal) the principal metaphor of life is presented by the enigma of woman. A man can never, it seems, quite understand the mystery of femininity. |
The process of work on a Pinter play must therefore preserve the ambiguity, while developing a clear understanding of what is to be hidden. I believe that Pinter is essentially a poetic dramatist. He and Beckett have brought metaphor back to the theatre, where Eliot and Auden failed. Although he revels in the vernacular rhythms of the London cockney, he is equally at home with the antithetical understatements of the English upper classes. The precision of his texts, and the form and rhythm of his lines, hold the audience in a formal grip as strong as Shakespeare or Beckett. |
Pinter is a great screenwriter: this is his craft. He constructs with precision. But as a dramatist he also works like a poet, because his text is as considered as a poet's. This the director must understand. To direct Pinter requires a rigorous respect for the form and an insistence that the actors understand and respect it. They cannot be sloppy, inaccurate or approximate in the use of his words. Above all, they must listen to his rhythms. There are, of course, finally as many ways of saying a line as there are human beings. But within that infinite freedom, there is only one shape, one rhythm to a Pinter line--and that is Pinter's. The task of the actor is therefore formal and a little like a musician's. Instead of deciding what the character is feeling and then inflecting what he says accordingly, the actor must first consider the line that is to be said and the shape and rhythm of it. The line is a given--rather like the notes of a musical phrase. What must the actor feel in order to make this shape the expression of truth? |
Pinter has to write a Pinter play because his form and style is so personal. And the actor has to subdue his idiosyncrasies in order to serve this style. Pinter works as a poet. In fact, having on occasion been very close to him, I have been aware how many of his plays have been genuine inspirations, seizing him completely until they are finished. Yet he is a consummate craftsman and never hands a play to a director that is not considered down to the last comma and pause. |
What's in a pause?
Pinter's pauses have become, journalistically, his trademark, and it is easy to denigrate them, even to think that they are meaningless--to think that the characters have nothing to say because they say nothing. This is never true. Pinter can be read quickly, jumping over the pauses. Actors can do the same. But the unsaid in Pinter is as important as the said; and is frequently as eloquent. He once rang me up and announced a rewrite: 'Page thirty-seven', he said (I found page thirty-seven). 'Cut the pause.' There was a smile in his voice as he spoke, but he was nevertheless dead serious. It was like cutting a speech. The placing of the pauses, and their emotional significance, have always been meticulously considered. His imitators do not understand this. He often uses nearly colloquial speech patterns. But by the use of silence and of pauses, he gives a precise form to the seemingly ordinary, and an emotional power to the mundane. It is a very expressive form of dramatic speech. |
There are three very different kinds of pauses in Pinter: Three Dots is a sign of a pressure point, a search for a word, a momentary incoherence. A Pause is a longer interruption to the action, where the lack of speech becomes a form of speech itself. The Pause is a threat, a moment of non-verbal tension. A Silence--the third category--is longer still. It is an extreme crisis point. Often the character emerges from the Silence with his attitude completely changed. As members of the audience, we should feel what happens in a Pause; but we can and should be frequently surprised by the change in a character as he emerges from a Silence. The change in him is often unexpected and highly dramatic. |
These three signs in the text all indicate moments of turbulence and crisis--the Three Dots, the Pause and the Silence. By their use, the unsaid becomes sometimes more terrifying and more eloquent than the said. Pinter actually writes silence, and he appropriates it as a part of his dialogue. The actor who has not decided what is going on in this gap will find that his emotional life is disrupted. The pause is as eloquent as speech and must be truthfully filled with intention if the audience is to understand. Otherwise the actor produces a non sequitur, which is absurd and makes the character ridiculous. I have always supposed that Pinter gained confidence in this technique because of Beckett's use of pauses. Certainly Beckett is the first dramatist to use silence as a written form of communication. Shakespeare's: 'Holds her by the hand silent', in Coriolanus, is the only other moment of complex drama that I know where words are deemed inadequate. |
The Pinter actor must understand that the silences, whether short or long, are moments of intense emotion. And although the characters are hiding what they are feeling, they must feel it nonetheless. The same goes for the reader. He should join the actor in deciding what emotions are being contained. |
The basis of much of Pinter is the cockney 'piss-take', much beloved of London taxi drivers. To take the piss out of someone is to mock them, to make them insecure. It is a primary weapon in the jungle of life. But the successful piss-taker must not let those from whom he is taking the piss, know that he is taking it. If this happens, he loses face. His mockery should be masked by grace and concern. The hostility is deeply hidden, the malice carefully concealed. Lenny, in The Homecoming, consistently makes his father uneasy by staring pleasantly at him. Or by simply ignoring him. He insults him with infinite charm and care. He converses with great concern. This is a master taker-of-piss. |
Melodrama and violence
Furthermore, there is underneath Pinter's dialogues a constant seething melodrama, filled with strong hates and forbidden lusts. Beneath the mask of speech, there are high passions, which the actors must know, and yet almost never reveal. To show your feelings in Pinter's world puts you at a fundamental disadvantage. You are weakened once your antagonist knows your motives. |
Very occasionally, these feelings come to the surface. They either become too hot to hide, or they are suddenly goaded into revelation. Then the violence--which has been hidden, though evident--suddenly erupts and a catatonic fit seizes the violater. |
This underlying violence has to be confronted in rehearsal. It is therefore necessary, as part of the work, to go through each scene exposing the crude emotions as if the actors were playing in a melodrama. They expose their passions completely and are encouraged to show their hatreds and their loves in extreme terms. They find out what the character wants. The selfish desire to exist, to be gratified, is the beginning of all acting--just as it is the beginning of existence. |
Having found these strong emotions, the next task is to hide them completely--contain them, bottle them up. But now the actors know what they are hiding. Once again, if this process is not followed, the pauses are empty and the dialogue abstract. The words and the pauses govern the passions and hide them. But both the words and the pauses must be earned. Unless the audience can follow the hidden emotions through the pause and under the verbal choices, they cannot understand the journey that the character is making. The vacillations will seem unmotivated, even ridiculous. There is a danger then that the audience will laugh at the play, rather than with it. |
For me, directing Pinter breaks down into a pattern of rehearsals with clear objectives. They are all designed to preserve the ambiguity. This means knowing clearly what is meant and then not overstating it--mostly, indeed, hiding it. |
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