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| Sketches
(2002) Royal National Theatre, London |
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Directed by Gari Jones Pinter Sketches I THAT’S YOUR TROUBLE THE BLACK AND WHITE TESS TROUBLE IN THE WORKS PRESS CONFERENCE
LAST TO GO SPECIAL OFFER THAT’S ALL NIGHT PRESS CONFERENCE |
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The playwright's triple risk Harold Pinter has a nerve. In his latest
sketch, Press Conference, he plays the central figure, the minister
for culture in a totalitarian state, a minister who was until recently
head of the secret police and who answers questions about the state
attitude to children ("We distrusted children if they were the children
of subversives. We abducted them and brought them up properly. Or
we killed them"), to women ("We raped the women. It was part of
an educational process"), and critical dissent. It's horrifyingly
funny, of course, but you can't miss the triple risk that Pinter
is running. First, he himself is undergoing treatment for cancer,
shows some of the physical signs of chemotherapy, but is battling
on. Second, he makes his totalitarian state sound just enough like
Britain to confuse some people. Third, his own role is also a kind
of self-caricature, an urbanely smiling bully who specialises in
black-voiced menace, the kind of role he has played dozens of times.
This is the latest in a long line of sketches that stretches back
to Pinter's earliest days as a playwright in the 1950s. One such
is glorious: the stage premiere of Tess, a female monologue written
in 2000 for, I'm told, Tatler magazine. Tess starts off like a Joyce
Grenfell ex-debutante type - she chats away about Mummy and Daddy
and growing up in the country. And then, without any apparent change
of key, she gets more surreal, more dotty. Her parents, her life,
the world all turn out to be crazy, but still the bright polished
deb tones keep coming in a rapid flow. Penelope Wilton - no actor
has a longer or more distinguished track record for playing Pinter
heroines - plays her to perfection. Pinter wrote most of his sketches
in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and each of these two National
anthologies featured three different ones from 1959: a rich year.
The National's casting was deluxe: Henry Woolf (Pinter's oldest
friend, who recently performed Monologue at the National) in Last
to Go with Andy de la Tour; Patrick Marber (the cleverest character
playing of all) in Trouble in the Works with Corin Redgrave, Frances
de la Tour, and Susan Woolridge in The Black and the White, and
more. His 1969 Night is beautifully acted by Douglas Hodge and Catherine
McCormack. He recalls that the first time he held her was on a bridge;
he recalls holding her breasts in his hands. She recalls no bridge,
she recalls a different place, she recalls how he took her hand
and gently stroked it. Has anyone ever caught more finely the differences
between male and female feelings about heterosexual love than Pinter?
Here, their differences of memory become almost a tragic divide.
These two live together in what they call love, and yet on the memories
of their initial and most intimate moments there is this unchangeable
discrepancy. This hairline crack could become an abyss - at times
it seems very large, but they live with it calmly. Pinter, now in
his 70s, can still seem the most modern playwright alive, but again
and again he puts himself at the end of long traditions. He is,
it often seems, the last modernist, the last classicist, and, in
plays like Night, the last romantic. |
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