18 - The Pinter paradigm: Pinter’s influence on contemporary playwriting

Summary

Ian Rickson's revelatory revival of The Hothouse at the Lyttelton Theatre in London's National Theatre in 2007 came in a year that confirmed the centrality of Pinter's work to the British stage, following on from equally notable new productions of Old Times (directed by Peter Hall) and Betrayal (directed by Roger Michell). These shows also confirmed a new generation of actors taking on the mantle of staging Pinter's work, Finbar Lynch and Paul Ritter in The Hothouse reviving their double-act in Lindsay Posner's production of The Birthday Party in 2005 and the triad of Sam West, Toby Stephens and Dervla Kirwan in Betrayal, the male leads scions of acting dynasties, dressed up in the clothes of their parents' generation to confer a contemporary chic on the play's mordant exploration of sexuality and memory. These three productions, amongst others, serve to confirm Pinter's status as the dominant British writer of the post-war era. His ubiquity on stage is matched by his undeniable yet rarely articulated impact on the wave of new British playwriting emerging from the early 1990s through to the present. Pinter's writerly ethic, his commitment to voice rather than narrative, his shunning of the epic or the ideological and his profound scepticism concerning gender relations seem perfectly pitched for the contemporary stage. Watching The Hothouse it was striking how the conventional notion of the 'Pinteresque' as a preoccupation with silence, the unsaid and the incommunicable was displaced by a new version of the Pinter aesthetic powered by a plenitude of language and quixotic wit. Where Jimmy Porter's rantings in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956), Beatie Bryant's eulogies in Wesker's Roots (1959) or the passionate polemics of Howard Brenton seem increasingly historical, Pinter's savage cackle, ruthlessly mapped demotic and dazzling non-sequiturs speak to a generation steeped in the surreal, amoral world of contemporary television comedy from Seinfeld to Green Wing.