Betrayal

'Jerry is a literary agent; Emma runs an art gallery; Robert is a publisher. Emma and Robert are married and Jerry is Robert's best friend, but Emma and Jerry have a seven-year affair and Robert has secrets of his own.'

Thus the flyer for Pinter's Betrayal, at Salisbury Playhouse, and it's all too easy to imagine a terrible play based on it, a middle-class soap opera involving arty people in Hampstead getting in and out of bed with each other. But it's a fascinatingly involving piece, not least for its technique of telling the story backwards, at each regressive step throwing everything into further doubt. What is this love story we are being shown? By the end we see it starts as a drunken declaration and fizzles out in boredom. Was there love along the way? Maybe, yet we are increasingly aware that behind every statement there is an evasion, or a deception. There was certainly desire, with Emma escaping from something and Jerry perhaps avoiding a disconnect  in his own marriage he does not want to address (or perhaps just arrogant enough to think he can have everything). Passion is surrounded by puzzle. Who knew what when? What further deceptions are taking place behind the scenes? Is Emma really just having drinks with Casey? Is Jerry's wife really just friends with her doctor colleague?In whose kitchen was a child thrown and caught? Pinter's trademark silences and pauses are filled with the sound of people searching for a foothold in an emotional landscape of ice and fog.

A capable cast found the drama of the words,  and the gaps between them. Emma (played by Kirsty Besterman - lovely to see her again here after Separate Tables) found a convincing spectrum from cool and controlling to utterly disconsolate. There was a real hint at something nasty not quite being shown in her marriage to Robert (Robert Hands), who seems to accept her affair with icy insouciance and yet exudes real menace. A brooding violence is internalised and expressed in insinuating verbal attack. His speech about squash had the effect of a brutal attack, while the Venice hotel scene projected a palpable tension. Jerry (Robert Mountford) played the lover, pinging like a squash ball between the other two. The Salisbury Playhouse has a very wide stage, and the production made full use of it: this might be thought to work against the intimate nature of the drama, but I thought it actually worked well, the spaces between the actors  bringing out the emotional distances between them, enhanced by ambient sound effects.

Betrayal is based on Pinter's own affair with Joan Bakewell. Rather knowingly, it has jokes about authors writing novels based on their own domestic lives. It has a slight period feel to it now, taking us to a time when we used traveller's cheques, and actually wrote letters to each other. And do literary agents earn so much that they can afford to buy, or rent, a flat in Kilburn purely for the occasional adulterous afternoon? Perhaps easier then than now. Yet it remains fresh, as it is not really about a particular affair, or even romantic affairs at all, but the nature of our dealings with each other, where our knowledge of our lives is only ever partial and every ordinary word casts a long and troubling shadow.

Pinter and Pragmatics

The dialogues of Harold Pinter are often cited by linguists working in the field of pragmatics. This is an area where linguistics and literary criticism (of drama) are close neighbours; so some entry-level pragmatics can certainly help us in a commentary on a Pinter passage. Here is the briefest of outlines of this rich field of enquiry, followed by a list of things to look out for in the plays.
Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context. To take a simple example, I might say:

It's cold in here.

The meaning of the words is clear enough (assuming I'm speaking literally rather than figuratively); but that is not the same thing as the meaning of the utterance. Analysis starts with the question 'What is the meaning of the utterance? To begin to answer this we need to consider the context.

Depending on the context, 'It's cold in here' could mean:

Please shut the door, or
You're not a very good builder, or
You're not looking after my elderly mother properly, or
You've left the window open again.

We could easily extend this list. The utterance in each case is functioning as a communicative act: I am ordering, pleading, threatening, complaining etc. So we can ask what the speaker is doing with / through the words employed (and in fact we analyse each other's statements int his way all the time).

The utterance 'It's cold in here' is addressed to someone (teh addressee), and thus the act is intended to have an effect on them - to frighten, reassure, persuade, mollify, confuse etc. We could take the meaning of the utterance as act + effect, which is dependent on context (though meaning may be further affected by non-verbal elements: tone of speech, gesture, facial expression etc.)

Conversations generally involve a set of conventions understood by the speakers. One obvious one is turn-taking - a dinner party conversation dominated by one or two loudmouths is spoiled by their disregard for this norm -  but there may be many others whihc are implicit (wait for your seniors to address you, always agree with the boss etc.). The linguist Paul Grice identified 'maxims' or rules of the game which can be observed in conversational exchanges. Two of these are the Maxim of Relevance (say what is relevant) and the Maxim of Quantity (say what you are in a position to say). When we depart from these rules, we are flouting the maxims, just as we are flouting the convention of turn-taking if we speak out of turn.

With this in mind, here are some things we can look out for when commenting on a Pinter passage. Very few refer to linguistic jargon (and Pinter was not writing for students of linguistics!). No quoted examples given (copyright) but it shouldn't be difficult to find any.

1. Concealed meaning. What is being said beneath the surface of the spoken words? There may be several possibilities.
2. What is the speaker doing through the words? (defending, intimidating, resisting etc.)
3. What is the effect of the speech (both the presumed intended effect and the actual one we see)?
4. Ambiguity, when the act and effect are unclear. It can be very disconcerting when we do not know why someone is saying what they are saying.
5. Conventions being followed (the ritual of reading the newspaper at the start of The Dumb Waiter).
6. Conventions being flouted (Gus speaking out of turn, asking questions he's not supposed to).
7. Turn-taking not happening (eg when A speaks, then there's a pause - implying B's turn - and A speaks again)
8. Discontinuity and disconnection between speakers (a sign might be consecutive questions)
9. Dead ends, where a thread of conversation leads to nothing.
10. Evasion, sudden shifts of subject (flouting maxim of relevance)
11. Unexpectedly long speeches (flouting maxim of quantity)
12. Conversations which are not conversations because the characters are not communicating, but isolated in individual worlds.
13. Dialogue may seem awkward because there are no observable codes or conventions, so the characters circle each other warily.
14. Anywhere where information might be being witheld, or there is a possibility that it is being invented (for example, descriptions of past events may be constructions)
15. Repetition: for insistence, reassurance etc.
16. Any words or phrases that create in our minds a notion of violence, invasion, death.
17. And, of course, what is happening in the pauses and silences?

Some links:

Q&A with Michael Billington has some useful comments on Pinter's use of language.

Linguistic approaches:
Chowdury Mohammed Ali, 'Grice's Maxims and a study of some dialogues in Pinter's The Caretaker'
Khorshid Mostofi, An Analysis of Characters' Inner Threats in The Caretaker and Grice's Concept of Implicature
University of Lancaster Linguistics Department, Conversational Implicature and The Dumb Waiter

Harold Pinter Resources

Some links for those studying Pinter, especially the early plays The Room and The Dumb Waiter. Needless to say, read secondary material only after you have thoroughlyimnmersed yourself in the actual pieces.

Interviews
The director Peter Hall said that he found playwrights spoke as they wrote. We can certainly recognise Pinter's style of writing in his considered, staccato speech.

An hour-long interview with Charlie Rose:



This British Library Interview with actor and director Harry Burton, was made near the end of Pinter's life.

Plenty of interesting things in this Paris Review interview from 1966.

Documentataries
Nigel Williams's excellent Arena documentary on Pinter. Part 1:



And Part 2:



Two other documentaries on DVD are Pinter's Progress (coupled with his masterpiece The Homecoming) and Working with Pinter.

Articles
Though most writing on Pinter concentrates on his major full-length works, there are some very good, thought-provoking pieces on The Room and The Dumb Waiter. The various writings by Martin Esslin have valuable chapters on these works. In addition:

General
This appreciation by the World Socialist Web Site gives a tidy outline of the life and work.

Bernard Dukore, The Theatre of Harold Pinter (JSTOR),  The Tulane Drama Review , Vol. 6, No. 3 (Mar., 1962), pp. 43-54. On themes in the early plays.

Ruby Cohn, The World of Harold Pinter, The Tulane Drama Review , Vol. 6, No. 3 (Mar., 1962), pp. 55-68. Puts the works in literary context. 

The Room

The Theatre Archive has interviews with members of the original production of The Room. For hardened theatre historians. The interview with Henry Woolf gives many insights.

Leonard Stone, 'Harold Pinter and the Fragmentation of Working-Class Consciousness' This is a very detailed essay on The Room from an online Marxist journal, concentrating on the depiction of class.

 

Article by Iranian academics on Alienation in Harold Pinter's The Room

 

 

The Dumb Waiter

 

Pi Binyan, Absurdity underneath realistic elements in Pinter's The Dumb Waiter

 

A director offers a reading of The Dumb Waiter as a religious parable.

Ruby Cohn, TheAbsurdly Absurd: Avatars of Godot, Comparative Literature Studies , Vol. 2, No. 3 (1965), pp. 233-240. Compares The Dumb Waiter and Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

Radmila Nastic, Realism and Metaphor: Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter

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