What is it that gives Harold Pinter's plays such enduring power and popularity?
“It's always quite difficult to understand the world that Pinter's characters are in,” says director Jeff James. James is in the process of reviving two Harold Pinter plays, and when we spoke over the phone, he put his finger on exactly what distinguishes this highly influential playwright from the politically engaged drama that we so often see selling itself on its ability to respond to current affairs.
Often set in a room that is cut off from the familiar outside world, Pinter's plays can seem lacking in the explicit social commentary that populates so much of today's drama, yet they continue to be regularly revived. I asked a collection of theatre critics if they could shed some light on why Pinter's work endures in today's fast-paced and politically responsive theatre scene.
“His works always prod painfully at timeless, universal human obsessions,” recognises Honour Bayes, theatre editor at Fourthwall Magazine. While specificity dominates today's theatre, the ambiguity of Pinter's drama and his lack of a defined time or place allows for constantly resonant reinterpretations of his plays. He repeatedly touches on timeless themes that can apply to any era, themes that Bayes goes on to identify as “power, cruelty, the search for a connection, and love”.
Power is perhaps the most significant of these themes, if only because it is seen in all of Pinter's drama. “People talk about a change in the 1980s when he became more political, but I see a continuity in his theatrical works,” says James, before he asserts that “Pinter has always been interested in power”. James' double bill of the short plays Victoria Station and One for the Road begins previews at The Print Room this week. The first depicts an intimate tussle for dominance between a taxi driver and his controller in a seemingly apolitical examination of the power balance between these two characters.
But it's Pinter's transparently political 1984 play, One for the Road, that is seen by many as the turning point at which Pinter became an explicitly political playwright. The play, which takes the form of a series of brutal interrogations, was Pinter's angry response to the indifference shown by two Turkish women he met towards torture practices in their country. Its unspecified setting remains potently and disturbingly applicable to any nation. “It feels more political because of the torture scenario,” James explains, “but still the investigation of power transcends that idea of torture.”
This engagement with politics in the later years of Pinter's life helped to feed a growing appetite for political theatre. Theatre critic Michael Coveney notes that Pinter's plays were “increasingly coloured by a political engagement with the rest of the world, especially in the land of despots and repression”. Pinter not only became more political as a playwright as he got older; but he also grew more politically outspoken in his personal life. Critic Jake Orr of A Younger Theatre cites Pinter's famous 2005 Nobel Prize speech as a powerful example, when he delivered an uncompromisingly harsh criticism of American foreign policy.
The political concerns that colour the current theatrical landscape were not missing from Pinter's life or his drama, but Pinter deals with political questions in a different, far less specific way. By refusing to pin down his plays to an exact location in time and space, he has made both theatre practitioners and audiences work harder, something that James notes: “Pinter is an incredibly intelligent playwright and there are all kinds of ambiguities in his work. What's really exciting is finding a way through those ambiguities”.
As James suggests, Pinter may not be the most straightforward of playwrights, but this is what makes his work so constantly intriguing and enduring. This December will mark three years since Pinter's death, but his plays continue to show remarkable signs of life. Thanks to his ever-relevant dissection of man's obsession with power, I suspect that Pinter will remain enthroned as a member of this country's playwriting royalty for many more years to come. As Orr puts it: “Pinter isn't the sort of writer who dissolves after his death; he lurks in every writer of today”.
One for the Road/Victoria Station runs at The Print Room from 13 September - 1 October.
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