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Bully for him
Published: 12/30/2008 3:53 PM
Last Modified: 12/30/2008 3:53 PM

When you boil Harold Pinter's work down to its essentials – and why not, since everything about his plays, from the characters to the action to the language, is concentrated into a kind of theatrical demi-glace – it's all about the bully.

It's everywhere in Pinter's plays. "The Birthday Party," his first full-length work, begins with the pivotal Stanley bullying his scatterbrained landlady through his truculence and perceived superiority, only to subjected to a more focused yet ambiguous (and therefore more menacing) interrogation by two strangers who show up at the boarding house, and ultimately carry Stanley off to some unnamed fate.

Even when he adapted someone else's work, as in his screenplays for "The Servant" and the recent remake of "Sleuth," the stories are mostly about two people fighting over who gets to rule whatever confined space in which they are trapped.

It can make for some wonderfully unsettling entertainment, as anyone who's seen a good production of a Harold Pinter play can attest. (Unfortunately for Tulsa audiences, only two Pinter plays have been staged here in the last two decades: the Tulsa Alliance for Classical Theatre superb 1986 production of "The Collection" – which had the perfect balance of comedy and menace – and a 1992 production by Heller Theater of "Betrayal.")

However, the subtlety and power that Pinter's plays displayed in exploring this obsession did not translate well into his other means of expression – poetry and political speeches.

Pinter wrote poetry throughout his life – I remember reading a slim volume of his verses during my undergraduate years. Little of it is memorable; a lot of it, especially the most recent stuff, was simply dreadful. And his political pronouncements always sounded like half-baked, reactionary rants.

Granted, most artists and performers dabbling in political rhetoric can't help but sound insipid or naïve – even the ones who may have made some effort to understand the issues on which they want to comment. But Pinter always made it a point to say he did not understand or analyze the world of his plays, which is one reason why they are so effective at generating nervous laughter, at making viewers uncomfortable as they watch the very intimate and deadly serious games of domination and control that are occurring on the stage.

Pinter once said his plays are about "the weasel under the liquor cabinet" – a deliberately goofy image that he later repudiated. But it's more than just a flip statement to put off an interview. It gets at the inherent strangeness of Pinter's plays – the mundane setting in which something unforeseen, unbidden and potentially dangerous lurks.

A play like "The Homecoming" or "The Caretaker" or "Mountain Language" or "The Hothouse" says more about the tensions of modern life, the fears that eat away at the security and sanity of so many on this planet than any of Pinter's bellowing about what bullies Bush and Blair have been in Iraq.

But it's for those cantankerous, knee-jerk reactions to politicians that Pinter won the Nobel Prize. Fortunately, Pinter's plays – his real legacy – will endure.



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ARTS

James D. Watts Jr. has lived in Oklahoma for most his life, even though he still has people saying to him, "Don't sound like you're from around these parts." A University of Oklahoma Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Watts has received the Governor Arts Award, Harwelden Award and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Beth Macklin Award for his writing. Before coming to the Tulsa World, Watts worked for the Tulsa Tribune.

Contact him at (918) 581-8478.

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