Pinter

[Paul Mackin]

I couldn't get enough of Pinter in the 60's but then completely lost  
interest in the plays.  Liked the 70's movie version of "The  
Homecoming" and several of the films Pinter worked on.

Here's how Daniel Mendelson ended his NY Review of Books piece on the  
2001 Pinter
Festival at New York's Lincoln Center


In view of the way in which the Lincoln Center tribute exposed  
Pinter's weaknesses and pretensions as much as it did his strengths,  
it was a gratifying surprise to witness the New York première of his  
most recent work, Celebration. First presented in London in the grand  
millennial year of 2000, this, at last, was a work that brought  
together all of the playwright's well-known preoccupations, modes of  
expression, and theatrical tropes. Yet it managed to create something  
very new for him, and for his audiences—something, finally, that was  
deeply and movingly political.

The play takes place in an upscale restaurant. There are two sets of  
diners, each of which is spotlighted in turn until the end, when it  
evolves that they have an uneasy connection to each other and they  
begin to communicate directly. There's a quiet couple, Matt and Suki,  
playfully talking about their romance, about sex. The larger, more  
boisterous group consists of a quartet of sozzled vulgarians out for  
a celebratory night on the town: two brothers, Lambert and Russell,  
married to two sisters, Julie and Prue. These four may be wearing  
expensive (if a tad cheesy) togs, but they're essentially working- 
class—not all that different, beneath their suits and cocktail  
dresses, from the grim couple in The Room, which was presented with  
Celebration as a double bill. Lambert and Julie, Russell and Prue are  
cheerfully, loudly ignorant (they don't know whether they've just  
been to the ballet or the opera), coarse ("they don't want their sons  
to be fucked by other girls," one of these aging girls cries out  
while on the subject of mothers-in-law), and wholly unconcerned if  
everyone else in the restaurant knows it. The men are clearly rich  
and smug about the success they've snatched from the Nineties glut.  
(Russell's a banker, and Matt and Lambert are "strategy consultants.")

Appearing onstage from time to time to disrupt these two groups are  
three members of the restaurant's staff: the maitre d', who's very  
solicitous of his customers' pleasure; his assistant, Sonia, a young  
woman who chats with the two parties and can't help revealing  
intimate things about herself (she's a hilarious parody of  
stereotypical British insularity: "You don't have to speak English to  
enjoy good food," she says, with some incredulity, after telling a  
story about a trip abroad); and, finally, a young waiter, who  
constantly interrupts both parties. "Do you mind if I interject?"  
he'll ask, each time, and then launch into stories about his now-dead  
grandfather and all the famous people he'd known and all the world- 
historical events he'd been grazed by. At one point, it's Hollywood  
in the Thirties; at another, it's Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the  
beginning of the First World War. The sheer, loony excess of these  
fevered riffs generates its own kind of hilarity:

     He knew them all, in fact, Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden, C. Day-Lewis,  
Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, George Barker, Dylan Thomas, and if  
you go back a few years he was a bit of a drinking companion of D.H.  
Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, W.B. Yeats, Aldous Huxley,  
Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Hardy in his dotage. My grandfather was  
carving out a niche for himself in politics at the time. Some saw him  
as a future Chancellor of the Exchequer or at least First Lord of the  
Admiralty but he decided instead to command a battalion in the  
Spanish Civil War but as things turned out he spent most of his spare  
time in the United States where he was a very close pal of Ernest  
Hemingway—they used to play gin rummy together until the cows came home.

Funny as this almost Homeric name-dropping is, it's the waiter and  
his heedlessly eager, puppy-dog attempts to interject, to insert  
himself, however inappropriately, into the proceedings that give the  
play its tension, poignancy, and meaning. Without him, the  
interactions among the two sets of diners would constitute a typical  
Pinter "drama": their vacuous, self-important chitchat and boasting  
and flirting would be entertaining—this is by far the funniest play  
Pinter has written; even if there had been those silences, you'd  
never have heard them, the audience was laughing so much—without  
being anything beyond a static parody of the avarice and greed that  
flourished in the last decade of the century. (Here again you think  
of Peter Greenaway, with whose The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her  
Lover, that vitriolic send-up of Thatcher-era greed, the new Pinter  
work shares a certain mood and style.)

But as the waiter keeps trying to catch the attention of his self- 
important, superficial charges, it's hard not to start noticing which  
names he drops. The eponymous celebration in this rich play may be an  
anniver-sary party—that's what the characters think, at any rate—but  
it soon becomes clear that what Celebration is celebrating, or at  
least marking, is the passing of the twentieth century. What this  
waiter keeps interjecting is, in fact, an endless string of  
references to gigantic swaths of twentieth-century culture: books,  
film, the Hollywood studio system, Mitteleuropa, Kafka, the Three  
Stooges, and so on. It's his third and final speech, with its  
reference to the assassinated archduke, that clues you in: before  
your eyes the whole twentieth century passes, from its beginning (the  
outbreak of World War I), to its middle, and right through to its  
tawdry end. But of course the diners don't really listen, because  
they've been blinded to the culture, to the century itself and its  
meanings, by their own narrow greed—by the kind of success that the  
century and its culture have, ironically, made possible, if not  
indeed inevitable.

Most of Pinter's work shows you evil things, and for that reason can  
upset you in some way, but precisely because he always stacks the  
dramatic deck, always tries to make up your mind for you, the plays  
are depressing without being the least bit tragic. What makes  
Celebration so provocative is the way in which it tantalizes you, as  
real tragedy does, with the specter of missed opportunities. That its  
subject—what it is that its characters are talking about, even if  
they can't hear each other—is world-historical and has a great deal  
to do with this specific post-millennial, post-ideological moment  
gives this short, vivid work a deep political gravity that none of  
the more obtuse "political" plays can match. You feel, for the first  
time, as if something's at stake here—something, that is, other than  
the playwright's feelings. In the week and a half of the Pinter  
festival, with its nine plays and numerous showings of the films, its  
onstage valentines posing as discussions, all accompanied by the  
endless drone of ongoing press adulation, you feel that here, at  
last, was something you were grateful to have the chance to watch.