another room
by Douglas Messerli
Harold
Pinter The Room (performance by the
Wooster Group) / the performance I saw, with Pablo, was at Redcat (Roy
and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) in the Disney Music Center on February 9, 2016
This
review is “illegal,” outlawed, evidently, by the licensing company of Samuel
French, Inc. and Harold Pinter’s British agent, Judy Daish.* Critics have been
told that because of “licensing irregularities” (a misunderstanding, evidently,
by the Wooster Group that permission to perform the play in New York City would
extend to Los Angeles and other places to which they might to wish to tour it),
that critics would not be permitted to review the work.
How in the US a British agent might ban
free speech about a shared cultural event is rather inexplicable, and I
certainly, do not have any intention of heeding such nonsense. What it does
demonstrate is the lack of perspective (how anyone might perceive a Wooster
Group performance might be competing with other productions is beyond me) and
meanness of spirit of Pinter’s agents. Or perhaps it simply parallels,
unintentionally, the sense of menace that The
Room in more normative productions projects.
In Pinter’s works generally the actors
behave as if they are in a naturalistic world, while their underlying language
reveals that they are in an absurd universe dominated by perversion and
paranoia. And it is that very tension that makes his plays so terrifying and
often inexplicable. How to explain the sudden appearance of strange men who show
up to celebrate a recluse boarder’s birthday party, while, apparently, seeking
his destruction (The Birthday Party);
or to comprehend the return of a married professor and his wife to his British
home, wherein the wife quickly takes up a sexual relationship with a brother
and comes to literally “embrace” the other brother and her husband’s randy
father, her husband returning the US without her (The Homecoming).
Or, more appropriately, what does one
make of a complaining housewife, whose husband refuses throughout breakfast to
speak, and whom, when her hubbie leaves for work, is threatened with eviction
from a room where she and her husband have been comfortably living in, before,
finally, being visited by a blind “negro” who asks her to “come home?”
Everything depends on the tension
between the seemingly realist portrayals of characters set against the utter
strangeness of their language and the events they encounter. In Pinter’s plays,
everything is slightly akilter, the world is out of whack. The kitchen sink
drama has suddenly become an encounter with the absurd.
In the Wooster Group’s rendition of the
play, however, the menace is nearly wiped away as the characters speak in a
kind of dry, unimpassioned monotone; another actor reads out the stage
directions, reminding us that what we are witnessing is truly a play; at
moments the characters inexplicably take up lutes and sing short, seemingly
improvisatory ditties. Actors Kate Valk, the always wonderful Ari Fliakos, and
Suzzy Roche mouth their lines as if they had been translated from another language
on Wikipedia, sometimes using more than one microphone as if, in the small
Redcat Theater, we might be unable to hear them if they were to speak
naturally.
By removing Pinter’s work from kitchen
sink reality which they often emanate, not only is the fear of the characters
(and their audiences) displaced, but the significance of their statements is
erased. Without that everyday complacency, we recognize just how strange Pinter’s
language really is, perceiving perhaps the oddity of what might at first have
appeared to be ordinary speech. The characters seem be almost children who
declaim without the ability to put their words into everyday context. Or
perhaps, one might describe them as children who have not yet learned to
pretend there are adults, not yet learned the proper way to lie.
What we perceive instead, is just how
comic Pinter’s words are; as if they were borscht-belt or dance-hall comedians,
reacting to the series of absurd events precisely as clowns instead of
supposedly living-and-breathing folk, these actors point up the syntax of
Pinter’s menace and terror, as opposed to instilling it with a sense of
possible reality.
And while that deflates the play itself,
it forces us to actually listen to Rose’s empty observations and complaints the
way her silent husband, Bert, must endure them. As Mr. Kidd, Fliakos sounds as
confused about who and what he is as Rose is assured by the warm fire of her
space heater and the clatter of her pots and pans. The slightly shell-shocked
Sands (Roche and Fliakos), having just visited the “damp” and “dark” basement, seem
in desperate need of someplace to spend the night.
Only the blind “negro” Riley, played by Philip
Moore as a somewhat blinkingly intelligent Ben Carson, seems to actually know
what he’s about: demanding that “Sal” (an earlier name for Rose?) return home; and it is he
alone who gives a slightly more realist performance. Yet given the
stick-figures around him, it is almost inevitable, in this fragile “reality,”
that he be stomped to death by Bert, finally determined to “speak out.”
I’m not sure that this is the best way to
experience my beloved Pinter, but, as Pinter’s agents have made clear, there
will be lots of other productions in the near future, which will surely more
carefully match the tone of the original works. But here, at least, we get an
opportunity to explore another Pinter, a writer with a sharp wit who questioned
the whole notion of what our “reality” really means.
Los Angeles,
February 10, 2016
*I
had a similar run-in with Judy Daish, when I called her one year in the late
1990s to enquire about the book rights to Jean Genet’s play, The Pope, a work that had never been
translated into English. Daish insisted that a big production in the US was
imminent and that, certainly, she would not offer the rights to a small press such as
my Green Integer. Since then, to my knowledge, there has been no major
production in the US, and no publication (except an unauthorized, personally
published one) of the text.
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