8 - Body language in Pinter’s plays

Summary

In the millennium year, Harold Pinter reached his seventieth birthday. Looking back over his achievements (as actor, pacifist, playwright, poet, critic, director, creator-adaptor of scripts that have sensitively translated the artistry of novelists into the medium of film, campaigner for civil liberties and freedom of speech), one is astonished at the sheer range and variety of endeavour to which he has brought a focused and profound commitment. Yeats, whom Pinter has long admired and studied, comes to mind as possessing a similar protean sensibility, which held to the belief that all creativity is both deeply personal and assuredly political. Fittingly there comes to mind the imperative that occurs in one of the many poems, 'An Acre of Grass', in which Yeats addresses himself as an old man: 'Myself must I remake'. There was to be no quiet putting-out to grass, no cosy retirement for him; rather Yeats envisaged questing after 'frenzy', the energetic, satirical rage and insight of Timon, Lear and the elderly William Blake or Michelangelo. It would be a new manifestation of himself and yet one wholly true to old forms; there would be no loss of integrity in this transforming process. To view the four volumes of Pinter's Plays is to see manifold changes of subject matter, focus, linguistic register, conversational idiom, style and structure; yet the inspiring vision is always and uniquely recognisable as Pinter's. Criticism has had to keep pace with those seeming changes of direction: since the late 1950s the plays have variously been claimed as fine examples of absurdism and of Freudian psychological theory applied to drama; they have undergone feminist revisioning and been championed for their meta-theatricality; and for the last decade they have been either praised or vilified for their confrontational political incisiveness.