Harold Pinter - Harold Pinter Plays 1: The Birthday Party, the Room, the Dumb Waiter, a Slight Ache, the Hothouse, a Night out, the Black and White, the Examination

It will immediately be subject to modification by the other twenty-three possibilities of it. No statement I make, therefore, should be interpreted as final and definitive. One or two of them may sound final and definitive, they may even be almost final and definitive , but I wont regard them as such tomorrow, and I wouldnt like you to do so today. Ive had two full-length plays produced in London. The first ran a week and the second ran a year. Of course, there are differences between the two plays.

In TheBirthdayParty I employed a certain amount of dashes in the text, between phrases. In TheCaretaker I cut out the dashes and used dots instead. So that instead of, say: Look, dash, who, dash, I, dash, dash, dash, the text would read: Look, dot, dot, dot, who, dot, dot dot, I, dot, dot, dot, dot. So its possible to deduce from this that dots are more popular than dashes and thats why TheCaretaker had a longer run than TheBirthdayParty. The fact that in neither case could you hear the dots and dashes in performance is beside the point. You cant fool the critics for long. They can tell a dot from a dash a mile off, even if they can hear neither.

It took me quite a while to grow used to the fact that critical and public response in the theatre follows a very erratic temperature chart. And the danger for a writer is where he becomes easy prey for the old bugs of apprehension and expectation in this connection. But I think Dsseldorf cleared the air for me. In Dsseldorf about two years ago I took, as is the Continental custom, a bow with a German cast of TheCaretaker at the end of the play on the first night. I was at once booed violently by what must have been the finest collection of booers in the world. I thought they were using megaphones, but it was pure mouth.

The cast was as dogged as the audience, however, and we took thirty-four curtain calls, all to boos. By the thirty-fourth there were only two people left in the house, still booing. I was strangely warmed by all this, and now, whenever I sense a tremor of the old apprehension or expectation, I remember Dsseldorf, and am cured. The theatre is a large, energetic, public activity. Writing is, for me, a completely private activity, a poem or a play, no difference. These facts are not easy to reconcile.

The professional theatre, whatever the virtues it undoubtedly possesses, is a world of false climaxes, calculated tensions, some hysteria, and a good deal of inefficiency . And the alarms of this world which I suppose I work in become steadily more widespread and intrusive. But basically my position has remained the same. What I write has no obligation to anything other than to itself. My responsibility is not to audiences, critics, producers, directors, actors or to my fellow men in general, but to the play in hand, simply. I warned you about definitive statements but it looks as though Ive Just made one.

I have usually begun a play in quite a simple manner; found a couple of characters in a particular context, thrown them together and listened to what they said, keeping my nose to the ground. The context has always been, for me, concrete and particular, and the characters concrete also. Ive never started a play from any kind of abstract idea or theory and never envisaged my own characters as messengers of death, doom, heaven or the milky way or, in other words, as allegorical representations of any particular force, whatever that may mean. When a character cannot be comfortably defined or understood in terms of the familiar, the tendency is to perch him on a symbolic shelf, out of harms way. Once there, he can be talked about but need not be lived with. In this way, it is easy to put up a pretty efficient smoke screen, on the part of the critics or the audience, against recognition , against an active and willing participation.

We dont carry labels on our chests, and even though they are continually fixed to us by others, they convince nobody. The desire for verification on the part of all of us, with regard to our own experience and the experience of others, is understandable but cannot always be satisfied . I suggest there can be no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. A character on the stage who can present no convincing argument or information as to his past experience, his present behaviour or his aspirations, nor give a comprehensive analysis of his motives is as legitimate and as worthy of attention as one who, alarmingly, can do all these things. The more acute the experience the less articulate its expression.

Apart from any other consideration, we are faced with the immense difficulty, if not the impossibility, of verifying the past. I dont mean merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning. What took place, what was the nature of what took place, what happened? If one can speak of the difficulty of knowing what in fact took place yesterday, one can I think treat the present in the same way. Whats happening now? We wont know until tomorrow or in six months time, and we wont know then, well have forgotten , or our imagination will have attributed quite false characteristics to today. A moment is sucked away and distorted, often even at the time of its birth. We will all interpret a common experience quite differently, though we prefer to subscribe to the view that theres a shared common ground, a known ground.

I think theres a shared common ground all right, but that its more like a quicksand. Because reality is quite a strong firm word we tend to think, or to hope, that the state to which it refers is equally firm, settled and unequivocal. It doesnt seem to be, and in my opinion, its no worse or better for that. A play is not an essay, nor should a playwright under any exhortation damage the consistency of his characters by injecting a remedy or apology for their actions into the last act, simply because we have been brought up to expect, rain or sunshine, the last act resolution. To supply an explicit moral tag to an evolving and compulsive dramatic image seems to be facile, impertinent and dishonest. Where this takes places it is not theatre but a crossword puzzle.

The audience holds the paper. The play fills in the blanks. Everyones happy. There is a considerable body of people just now who are asking for some kind of clear and sensible engagement to be evidently disclosed in contemporary plays. They want the playwright to be a prophet. There is certainly a good deal of prophecy indulged in by playwrights these days, in their plays and out of them.

Warnings, sermons, admonitions, ideological exhortations, moral judgements, defined problems with built-in solutions; all can camp under the banner of prophecy. The attitude behind this sort of thing might be summed up in one phrase: Im telling you! It takes all sorts of playwrights to make a world, and as far as Im concerned X can follow any course he chooses without my acting as his censor. To propagate a phoney war between hypothetical schools of playwrights doesnt seem to me a very productive pastime and it certainly isnt my intention. But I cant but feel that we have a marked tendency to stress, so glibly, our empty preferences. The preference for Life with a capital L, which is held up to be very different to life with a small 1, I mean the life we in fact live. The preference for goodwill, for charity, for benevolence, how facile theyve become, these deliverances .