When Pinter received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, by my estimation, it was about 35 years too late. Although to a degree, I get it: Samuel Beckett (deservedly) won in 1969, and the Swedish Academy probably felt that Pinter was too similar to Beckett to grant him the award until enough time had passed.
Except Pinter isn’t like Beckett, and it’s weird to me that some have considered him Beckett’s heir. Even Martin Esslin (who coined the term ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ to group playwrights like Beckett) would later consider Pinter an essential playwright of the genre. Let’s recap some of Beckett’s plays: Waiting for Godot sees Vladimir and Estragon doomed to repeat the actions of the previous day; Endgame sees Clov unable to leave Hamm despite wanting to; Winnie is still in the mound by the end of Happy Days. They’re all characterized by stasis. Of course, there are changes in these plays—Pozzo and Lucky switch their roles in Godot; Nell dies(?) in Endgame; Winnie is deeper in the mound in Happy Days—but the changes only serve to highlight the repetition. (Beckett… the American minimalist of Irish experimental playwriting?)
By contrast, Pinter’s plays may delight in their ambiguities and non-resolutions, but they’re not circular. Nor do they have Beckett’s extreme existentialism in them, or often any deeper meaning at all for that matter. Quoth Pinter: “I certainly don’t write from any kind of abstract idea. And I wouldn’t know a symbol if I saw one.” To look for a point in The Birthday Party or The Homecoming is to miss the point, which is that there is none. His plays are exactly as they are.
(It goes both ways: the lack of symbols and deeper meaning means that there’s not as much to plumb when it comes to these plays. I re-read Hamlet last month, and even a minor detail like “Not a mouse stirring” —> The Mousetrap —> “How now? A rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead” isn’t even bothered with by Pinter.)
The plot of most Pinter plays can be summed up pretty succinctly: Pinter creates a room, fills it with a couple or a family, and then presents an external force (typically manifested in an actual person, although in The Dumb Waiter, an inanimate object that functions as a person anyway) that threatens to undo them. Two men show up to a family-run boarding house in The Birthday Party. Aston invites a stranger to stay with him in The Caretaker. James calls Harry and Bill’s house ominously and then shows up at their door in The Collection. Walter returns home from jail in Night School. Etc. (I’d say the similarities between the two playwrights are far more superficial: i.e. a small number of characters in isolation.)
Furthermore, unlike Beckett, Pinter’s plays would feel real if not for the themes of domination and subservience explored via extreme violence, a violence that’s gotten him compared to Quentin Tarantino (a comparison, I suspect, to get film people into drama but doesn’t hold up with any sort of scrutiny). Especially his dialogue. Half the plays are uncomfortable, pregnant pauses in contrast to other playwrights where dialogue might be unencumbered with the pocks and pauses of real life speech. Pinter, then: a weird mix of naturalism (a type of play that is characterized by adhering to three simple rules: it has to be real, meaningful and simple, and Pinter hits 2/3 of that checklist) and absurdity.
After writing his first play in 1957 at the age of 27, Pinter was prolific in his early period; not counting his ‘revue sketches,’ I count seventeen plays written between 1957 and 1969. Here’s a run-down on seven of those plays in chronological order, saving the best for last. (Worth stating is if Pinter is unfamiliar to you…most of his plays can be found for free online. All that great literature, just a Google search away.) Spoilers ahead.
The Birthday Party (1957)
The play takes place in a living room of an unpopular boarding house that has only ever had one visitor-turned-resident Stanley. Stanley is awful. Our introduction to him is him being needlessly aggressive towards the too-flirty Meg (who co-runs the boarding house with her husband Pete).
Two strangers named Goldberg and McCann arrive for a room for the night, and they plan with Meg to host Stanley a birthday party that evening, even though Stanley continually denies that it is actually his birthday. It’d be wrong to say ‘the birthday party goes exactly as you’d expect’ since it’s even worse than you can imagine. Before the actual party, Goldberg and McCann batter Stanley with a wide array of rhetorical questions (“Why did the chicken cross the road?”). At the party, during a game of blind man’s bluff, McCann deliberately breaks Stanley’s glasses and trips him with a toy drum that Meg got Stanley for his ‘birthday.’ Stanley chokes Meg, and when the lights suddenly cut out, the party members finds Stanley in the process of attempting to rape the young neighbor Lulu (“LULU is lying spread-eagled on the table, STANLEY bent over her”). This is the moment he snaps. Once, long ago, a promising concert pianist, Stanley’s been reduced to nothing: living in a rundown boarding house with no jobs, no prospects (he mentions a potential job at one point in the first act, but it’s clear that he’s blowing smoke up his own and Meg’s ass), and now two strangers (with unwitting help from a naïve Meg) have taken away both his vision and manhood.
The third act begins the following morning, and it’s revealed to the audience that all of that was only the start of the night: even the sinister Goldberg and McCann are skittish towards each other; Lulu arrives at the house but is upset with Goldberg and her lines suggest that he took advantage of her (“What would my father say, if he knew? And what would Eddie say? […] He was my first love, Eddie was. And whatever happened, it was pure. With him! He didn’t come into my room at night with a briefcase!”). Goldberg and McCann eventually take Stanley who doesn’t even have the power to speak anymore, put him in a van and drive off to see the ominous and ambiguous “Monty,” who they claim is a doctor. Petey, Meg’s husband, who is absent for the titular party makes a feeble attempt at saving Stanley, and then steps aside when Goldberg and McCann turn their attention on him.
(A quick note: that Goldberg and McCann represent two major religions—through Goldberg’s name and McCann is supposedly a recently-defrocked priest—both feel like red herrings, the same as Beckett building in the word ‘God’ into ‘Godot.’)
Dark and depressing, this one. No redeemable characters; Meg seems well-intentioned, but also a fool, and no better evidence than the fact that she thought a toy drum was a good birthday gift in lieu of a piano (they’re both music instruments, you see, that was her logic). Because it’s Pinter’s first full-length play, I’m forgiving of the parts where Goldberg and McCann are interrogating Stanley which could have been tighter and would have still gotten their points across which is the slow methodical deconstruction of this supposed tough guy Stanley. Quick note: I always assumed Nick Cave’s early post-punk band was named after this play but it turns out that’s not true.
The Dumb Waiter (1957)
A one-act play featuring two characters Ben and Gus in a basement room. In the same room is a dumb waiter, a little elevator that continues to send orders down to Ben and Gus of increasing difficulty (absurdity), and that there is a speaking tube that they use to communicate with whoever is upstairs, lends the mechanical dumb waiter the characteristic of a third character even though we never hear them say anything. The dumb waiter is the external force here, even though it’s in the same room. As the difficulty of the requests evolve from steak and chips to Macaroni Pastitsio to char siu and beansprouts to, finally, scampi, the tension between the two men similarly escalates, and I can’t help but think of those Overcooked games in that regard except the two men note that they’re not in a kitchen basement and don’t have any means of producing food.
What I like most is that Ben and Gus bemoan the state of the world as they discuss morbid deaths in the news, and then it’s revealed to us that they’re hitmen, both brandishing revolvers and were sent to this basement room for some unspecified and ominous ‘job.’ “BEN. (Slamming down the paper.) What about that, eh? A kid of eleven killing a cat and blaming it on his sister of eight! That’s enough to—”, echoing an earlier statement that Ben makes when he reads about a 87-year old man who gets crushed to death by a lorry, “It’s enough to make you want to puke, isn’t it?” Two hitmen, lamenting all that death in the news!
There’s a simmer here, established from the opening stage direction alone which repeats the word ‘Silence’ three times as it introduces the two characters, creating a menacing atmosphere early on that constantly threatens to boil over. And yes, there’s clearly some Beckett influence in this one: two characters who are in a place and lack purpose, with a lot of off-stage/screen urination.
The Caretaker (1959)
The setting is a single cluttered room that Mick owns and his brother Aston lives in, and the conflict begins when Aston invites Davies (the external force) to stay. Davies is poor and needs help, but is not a sympathetic character; in fact, he is extremely unlikable, a pathological liar and a racist, and the only person that will help him is Aston. Like all of Pinter’s plays, no one is talking to each other, just talking at each other. There’s three different topics being had in this little snippet alone, and arguably four since Aston doesn’t comprehend Davies’ meaning when Davies says the shoes Aston is giving him are too small:
DAVIES. How many more Blacks you got round here then?
ASTON. What?
DAVIES. You got any more Blacks around here?
ASTON. (holding out the shoes). See if these are any good.
DAVIES. You know what that a bastard monk said to me? (He looks over to the shoes.) I think those’d be a bit small.
ASTON. Would they?
DAVIES. No, don’t look the right size.
ASTON. Not bad trim.
But the crux of The Caretaker are that both Davies and Mick take advantage of the trusting Aston who reveals that he was forced to endure electroshock therapy which has left him dumb (“The trouble was…my thoughts…had become very slow…I couldn’t think at all”). There is no clarity of whether he actually needed such a barbaric process done; Aston leaves it ambiguous of whether or not he actually did experience hallucinations (“The trouble was, I used to have kind of hallucinations. They weren’t hallucinations, they…I used to get the feeling I could see things…very clearly”).
Even Mick, who harbours at least some brotherly sentiment towards Aston (“Did you call my brother nutty? My brother. That’s a bit of…that’s a bit of an impertinent thing to say, isn’t it?”) is also in it for himself. He hires Davies to be a caretaker (despite Davies clearly not being fit for such a role), ostensibly to take care of the room but more likely to take care of his brother so that he himself would not have to. At least in Of Mice and Men, Lenny has George. Here, Aston has no one. Another depressing one for Pinter.
Night School (1960)
A minor play, and here’s how I know: I picked this up while visiting New Orleans in 2018, finished it, and then forgot that I read it at all until halfway through re-reading it this year. Conceived for a television, the short play centers around the return of Walter from his second stint in prison who returns to his aunts’ house and learns that they’ve started renting out his room to Sally. All characters that aren’t Walter’s aunts play a little game of deception: Sally lies about her true occupation so she can have room and board at Walter’s aunts’ house; Walter lies about why he went to jail to appear as a bigger deal than he actually is to impress Sally (via crime?); Solto lies about his wealth to evade taxes, and then lies to Walter about Sally’s true occupation.
But the deceptions aren’t interesting, and anyone who has read a single other Pinter play can make an educated guess about Sally’s true nature (i.e. she doesn’t go to night school) which is the crux of the play, and the play doesn’t resolve satisfyingly either: Solto learns the truth about Sally but doesn’t tell Walter who put him up to it; Sally just leaves, poof!
There is one moment of deliberate ambiguity in the play where Walter suddenly orders Sally to cross/uncross her legs, an extremely sexual turn from the previous dialogue where Walter unsuccessfully flirts at Sally’s direction. So it’s up to the reader and/or production of whether Sally actually obeys this man’s orders (the only stage direction we’re given are the Pinter pauses between each command), or remain unmoving to further highlight Walter’s ineffectuality.
WALTER. Sit down.
SALLY. What?
WALTER. Sit down. (Pause.) Cross your legs.
SALLY. Mmmmm?
WALTER. Cross your legs.
Pause.
Uncross them.
Pause.
Stand up.
Pause.
Turn round.
The Collection (1961)
Like Night School, The Collection is another game of deception involving all four characters who attempt to verify if Stella (the only female character) had a one-night affair with Bill (the youngest), and the audience is left playing detective and trying to make heads or tails of it all. Here is the summary of what happens:
Stella’s husband James confronts Bill. James says that Stella told him that Bill came into her hotel room while they were both at Leeds.
Bill, in defense, claims that Stella came on to him in the elevator and they only “kissed a bit,” confirming that they did, in fact, meet, but changing key details.
Bill’s partner Harry confronts Stella. Stella claims that her husband has “suddenly dreamed up such a fantastic story,” and that she has never met or spoken to Bill.
Harry confronts James, stating that Stella told Harry that Stella made the whole thing up.
James asks why Bill would tell him that he kissed his wife. Harry says that Bill likes to make up wild stories with the best line of the play, “He confirms stupid sordid little stories just to amuse himself…”
Bill subsequently claims that he did, in fact, meet Stella and talk with her (“about it”) but did not do anything.
James goes home to confront Stella about the truth.
A lot to unpack, a lot of ‘this person says that that person said,’ and ultimately none of the characters or us, the audience, learn of what really transpired. Much more fun than the other plays talked about thus far.
The Lover (1962)
Like The Homecoming in its absolute deconstruction of the upper-middle class family but with a smaller scope, The Lover follows husband Richard and his wife Sarah who appear to be a polyamorous relationship at the start of the play. It’s then revealed that they’re playing a fantasy game by transforming into these other lovers that they’re sleeping with. Richard leaves Sarah in the afternoon and returns as Max, only to transform again back to Richard in the evenings. Similarly, Richard makes clear to Sarah that he has a whore on the side (“But I haven’t got a mistress. I’m very well acquainted with a whore, but I haven’t got a mistress”); the whore is, of course, a transformed Sarah. Both Max and the nameless whore are created so that Richard and Sarah can love each other and remain faithful to each other, paradoxical as that might seem, and one can argue there’s no greater proof of their love than how willing they are to change for one another (key line near the end: “I’ll change for you, darling,” even though Sarah is talking about clothes there).
The ‘twist’ is less interesting than the implications, and I think I was smart enough to figure it out before it’s revealed to the audience when Sarah welcomes Max into the house and the stage direction says “RICHARD comes in.” (Put it this way: if it was merely a play about polyamory, it would have still been pretty radical for ‘62 but also deeply boring.) But note that when Richard transforms into the roguish Max to satisfy his wife, he invents a wife and children for Max that he cares deeply about (“I can’t deceive [my wife] any longer […] I’ve been deceiving her for years. I can’t go on with it. It’s killing me”). He could have transformed into anything, a devilishly handsome gentleman with no attachments to have wild sex with this willing woman, but he chose instead to transform into a version that cares deeply for a non-existent family. Typical for Pinter, even his attempt at a romance is deeply twisted. Biggest laugh-out-loud moment of any of these plays:
MAX. You’re not plump enough. You’re nowhere near plump enough. You know what I like. I like enormous women. Like bullocks with udders. Vast great uddered bullocks."
SARAH. You mean cows.
MAX. I don’t mean cows. I meant voluminous great uddered feminine bullocks. Once, years ago, you vaguely resembled one […] But now, quite honestly, compared to my ideal…
He stares at her.
…you’re skin and bone.
The Homecoming (1964)
My favourite of Pinter’s. The Beckett plays linger in my head for longer, but I have more fun rereading this one. In fact, I wish I could read The Homecoming for the first time again to experience its piling-on of what-the-fuckery in the second act that no amount of dripping menace in the first act could have prepared you for. (I did get to live vicariously by introducing my partner to the play and reading out the parts aloud; she was equal parts confused and enthralled which is the effect Pinter has.)
The scope is larger than the previous Pinter plays (denoted, somewhat facetiously, by the fact that the characters are in a large room this time), including the most interesting female character Pinter has written thus far in Ruth. Like The Caretaker, the characters don’t talk to each other, which is most notable in the climax when Sam reveals a long-kept and dark secret to the rest of the family and then promptly collapses to presumable heart failure, and everyone does what they’ve done all play long: ignore what’s been said (and ignore the body on the ground too). The violence and the demented family dynamic is established from the opening father-son conversation and only gets more and more twisted as the play goes on:
LENNY. I’m reading the paper.
MAX. Not that paper. I haven’t even read that paper. I’m talking about last Sunday’s paper. I was just having a look at it in the kitchen.
Pause.
Do you hear what I’m saying? I’m talking to you! Where’s the scissors?
LENNY. (looking up, quietly) Why don’t you shut up you daft prat.
MAX lifts his stick and points it at him.
MAX. Don’t you talk to me like that. I’m warning you.
Contrary to the previous Pinter plays, the family that resides in the room at the start of the play aren’t the protagonists, and Ted’s arrival isn’t the external force that threatens to undo them. (Nor is Ted the protagonist as much as he is an observer like the audience: powerless.) They do that to themselves, alpha-male types vying for dominance, although Ted’s wife Ruth—the only female character—merely exacerbates the process.
A few ambiguities that make this play worth re-reading. Is Teddy actually a philosopher? Because he is either unable or merely unwilling to answer Lenny’s questions about philosophy. Is Teddy a cuckold, or does he knowingly bring Ruth to meet his family, guessing that she’ll stay behind and allow him to return to his children in America, with his ties to his old family and to his wife both severed at once? I interpret it that he is a philosopher and he is unwitting, but I don’t think the other readings are wrong.
LENNY. One night, not too long ago, one night down by the docks, I was standing alone under an arch, watching all the men jibbing the boom, out in the harbour, and playing about with the yardarm, when a certain lady came up to me and made me a certain proposal [...] Well, this proposal wasn't entirely out of order and normally I would have subscribed to it. I mean I would have subscribed to it in the normal course of events. The only trouble was she was falling apart with the pox. So I turned it down. Well, this lady was very insistent and started taking liberties with me down under this arch, liberties which by any criterion I wouldn't be expected to tolerate, the facts being what they were, so I clumped her one. It was on my mind at the time to do away with her, you know, to kill her, and the fact is, that as killings go, it would have been a simple matter, nothing to it. Her chauffeur, who had located me for her, he'd popped round the corner to have a drink, which just left this lady and myself, you see, alone, standing underneath this arch, watching all the steamers steaming up, no one about, all quiet on the Western Front, and there she was up against the wall - well, just sliding down the wall, following the blow I'd given her. Well, to sum up, everything was in my favour, for a killing. Don't worry about the chauffeur. The chauffeur would never have spoken. He was an old friend in the family. But...in the end I thought...Aah, why go to all the bother...you know, getting rid of the corpse and all that, getting yourself into a state of tension. So I just gave her another belt in the nose and a couple of turns of the boot and sort of left it at that.
RUTH. How did you know she was diseased?
LENNY. How did I know?
Pause.
I decided she was.
Silence."