Superfluities Redux

by George Hunka
Artistic director, theatre minima

A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater

Friday, 26 December 2008

Harold Pinter

The last reel unspools:
Harold Pinter in his final stage appearance, as Krapp
in Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, in 2006

Harold Pinter passed away yesterday, 24 December 2008, at the age of 78. The New York Times obituary, credited to Ben Brantley and the late Mel Gussow, is here.

Pinter's work was central to my finding my own way as a dramatist; The Homecoming and No Man's Land were among my first experiences of contemporary theatre. More important to me is not his style, which is most easily imitated and parodied (I wasn't the first to imitate and parody it in my juvenilia, and I won't be the last), but his example, which is not. No doubt we'll be hearing a lot about both in the next few days; finally, for me, it will be the example of his intransigence in the face of criticism and his refusal to compromise with the desires of the day that endures, since the voice and style themselves are finally all his own. A few years ago, writing about Pinter's winning the Nobel Prize, I said:

Lear standing alone on the heath is a universal figure of tragic human consciousness – shorn of the trappings of royalty, of the community, he recognizes the horrifying mockery of the essence of humanity that royalty and community constitute. His enemies are his offspring: love rendered meaningless by death, treachery, his own illusions. Only a small, seemingly insignificant gesture here and there, such as the loosening of a shirt's button that seems to constrain the final throes of death, offers compassionate respite. So Lear, so Hamm – the reluctant ministrations of his manservant (his son?) Clov still keep them together, alone against an empty world; it isn't Hamm who shunts his own parents aside, but time and aging and the decay of the body, the vehicle of humanity; an ashcan is his own next stop. Pinter's own characters (even to the point of parents and children; procreation is no relief, not when the children are Lenny, Teddy and Joey of The Homecoming, the psychotic brothers Aston and Mick of The Caretaker, or the surrogate sons Foster and Briggs of the playacted marriage of Hirst and Spooner in No Man's Land) are not at all dissimilar. His torturers and victims exist in unnamed countries; this lack of names renders them universal. His simple tables, chairs and bare rooms parallel the bare heath of Lear, the sparsely furnished bunker in which Hamm and Clov spend the last days of life on earth.

What Pinter shares with Shakespeare and Beckett is an increasingly uncomfortable truth in a consumerist age: that all the money, all the success, all the nationalistic or racial pride, all the conviction in our own victimhood, all the conviction in the unerring rightness of our own cause, all the possessions we can collect, all the children we can produce, cannot possibly fill the abyss we pretend to ignore every day. To come face to face with the terrorism of the world, be it a sudden war in Iraq or the plunging of a jet plane into a tall building, the last thing we should do is to pretend that we couldn't do the same thing ourselves, in the most geopolitical or the most intimate contexts. The most radical, the most revolutionary act that Shakespeare, Beckett and Pinter suggest is to recognize and accept this abyss, and that, to do so, we needn't do more than glance into the nearest mirror.

I suppose I could add to this, but I prefer to allow Pinter at the last to speak for himself. (There will be much bullshit said, positive and negative, by others about Pinter over the next week or so, along with the sincere appreciations; I think this will be my only post on the matter and leave it at that.) First, there's Pinter's 1954 note about Samuel Beckett which can be found in the collection Various Voices, a note that applies just as much to Pinter himself:

The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don't want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, way outs, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him. He's not fucking me about, he's not leading me up any garden, he's not slipping me any wink, he's not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he's not selling me anything I don't want to buy, he doesn't give a bollock whether I buy or not, he hasn't got his hand over his heart. Well, I'll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty. His work is beautiful.

And, finally, "Art, Truth & Politics," Pinter's 2005 Nobel Prize address, below introduced by David Hare:

Earlier "Notes on The Homecoming" here.

Posted in /Dramatists/Harold_Pinter
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Friday, 26 December 2008

Sarah Kane: Skin

The self-destructive failures of the ideologically- and communally-constructed self, as well as the risks of transgressive vulnerability, tenderness and love, are at the center of Sarah Kane's only film for television, Skin, written in 1995 just after her first major stage play Blasted. The 11-minute film is more of an anecdote than a story; nonetheless, it retains considerable power as an incision into the bowels of hate and the attractive desire towards the abject as defined by Julia Kristeva:

A comparison of the final film with the screenplay as published in the Complete Plays is instructive. The most interesting difference is the cutting of an unnecessary and mute commentary by the old black man who appears very briefly in the beginning, middle and end of the film: his compassion is less forced in the film than in the script, and a particularly unnecessary sentimentalism is excised; the compassion here is gentler, more subtle and more powerful. (I also note the mordant commentary on "communication," here rendered as a satire on the cellphone and answering machine, a few years before cellphones became ubiquitous; that the skinheads use them to coordinate a violent racist brawl is a dark commentary on the technology. So much for the "text swarm.")

Though produced in 1995, it received its television debut only in 1997 on the BBC's Channel 4. Due to the depiction of violence and racism in Skin, the Daily Mail called it "one of the most violent and racially offensive programmes ever to be made for television in this country." Despite this, director Vincent O'Connell was nominated for a Golden Bear award for the film at the 1996 Berlin International Film Festival.