harold pinter 1930-2008

i think i prefer stoppard.
maybe it's a generational thing, even tho only 7 years separates them. pinter seems to belong to high modernism, stoppard to post-modernism. the ghost of beckett inhabits pinter's plays & haunts his dialogue. this isn't a bad thing; it just places him in an earlier era.

i first read pinter in anticipation of the film release of "the homecoming." it was part of a series of "great plays" being done as films(american film theater). that was 1973, my senior year of high school. i'm not sure i really "got" him then. the film version made it a little easier. at the time, i still considered o'neill to be superior to williams as a dramatist. o'neill READ better. i hadn't seen a real live professional stage production in 1973(unless you include woodham high school's yearly plays directed by hulda...i don't). on the page, pinter seemed to lack something, more than williams even. the language was pared down to almost nothing, like beckett. but i didn't hear any jokes, didn't catch any vaudeville references, no laurel & hardy. i didn't care for it.

o'neill's characters talked. they told us ALL about it, probably as much as an 18yo know-it-all. i liked that. what's funny is that o'neill's characters were doing exactly what pinter's do:

"The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, and anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its true place. When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness."

that's actually what i didn't get. we're not talking about sliding signifiers here. it's not that the thing named is no longer the thing itself. that kind of thing comes later, w/stoppard & churchill. we're talking about filling the empty space of living w/words. within that context, how much meaning can be generated by long speeches? w/pinter, silence becomes a vehicle for conveying meaning. or the repetition of a single word("tocello"). or that short-hand communication we call slang("the game"). pinter's characters say a lot too. they just don't always speak. on stage, this can be seen.

pinter is more than just a lesson in showing & telling. there's a lot of raw brutality in his plays. by that, i don't mean physical violence. his characters act out of the basest of motives(greed, lust, envy, revenge)& his eye for & understanding of those motives is deep & true.

i suppose he got frustrated showing us these things. telling sometimes has it's place too. or: showing is what you do in art; in real life, you must speak out. he retired from writing & became an eloquent & outspoken political voice against his country's involvement in the iraq war & america's 20century history of empire building. he didn't mince his words here either: "The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law." raw & brutal. deep & true.

stoppard keeps writing. his newest, "rock & roll," is opening out here in sf soon. he's written big plays lately("the coast of utopia" is a trilogy). i don't really know his politics, tho based on his plays, it's left-leaning. in the end, a writer's politics are a footnote in his life. in fact, his life is a footnote to his art...in the end. choosing life instead of art can't be easy for an artist.

but it says a lot.

i guess, all in all, i actually prefer pinter.