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Acting on the Cutting Edge: Pinter and the Syntax of CinemaAuthor(s): Gay Gibson CimaSource: Theatre Journal, Vol. 36, No. 1, The Interpretive Actor (Mar., 1984), pp. 43-56Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3207359Accessed: 28/08/2008 18:52

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Acting on the Cutting Edge:Pinter and the Syntax of Cinema

Gay Gibson Cima

Just as Henrik Ibsen's seemingly obscure dramas baffled critics and audiences a cen-tury ago, Harold Pinter's plays confused theatre-goers in the early 1960's. ReidDouglas, for example, writing in the Tulane Drama Review in 1962 and echoing theIbsen critics writing in the 1890's, argued that a Pinter play was "complex enough to beinterpreted n a dozen ways - always a suspicious indicator, suggesting as it does thatthe commentator has little idea of the real purpose of the script."' While the difficultywith Ibsen's plays stemmed from his characters' complex motivations and his experi-mentation with symbol systems, the confusion about Pinter's work emerged primarilyfrom his tendency to treat the stage as if it were a film screen. For over two decadesPinter has worked as a screenwriter, adapting as many as eight novels, as well as hisown plays for television and film.2 His screenwriting career has affected his play-writing methodology, most clearly, perhaps, in Old Times. In it he depends heavilynot only on non-verbal (visual) sign systems but also on various cinematic experi-ments with the narrative sequence, exploring on stage what Christian Metz calls the"new syntactical regions" of the films of the past two decades.3 In attempting to breakaway from the exposition-conflict-denouement grammar of the well-made play tocreate a more open semiotic system nearer the principles of film, Pinter places newdemands not only on audiences but also on actors. As an examination of his OldTimes reveals, Stanislavski's method must be replaced by an acting approach based onbehavior.

Gay Gibson Cima is an Assistant Professor f Modern Drama at Georgetown University. She has published onAsian and modern drama in Theatre Survey, TJ, and Asian Theatre Bulletin.

'Reid Douglas, "The Failure of English Realism," Tulane Drama Review, 7, No. 2 (Winter 1962), p.181.

2See Steven H. Gale, Harold Pinter (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978), pp. 4-6.3Christian Metz, Film Language, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974),

p. 211.

43

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As early as 1966, Pinter chafed at what he saw as the major drawback of play-scripts, their tendency to foster the smoothly flowing motivational sequences of cause

and effect: "I do so hate the becauses of drama. Who are we to say that this happensbecause that happened, that one thing is the consequence of another? . . . Life is moremysterious than plays make it out to be."4 In an effort to capture that mystery in OldTimes, Pinter transposes, edits, and interlaces scenes. Building on such concepts asEisenstein's montage theories and Metz's perception that the cinematic shot is "notcomparable to the word in a lexicon; rather it resembles a complete statement (of oneor more sentences)," Pinter treats each dramatic scene as a shot or statement that maybe posited in various ways against a competing statement. In doing so, he abandonsthe Ibsenian tradition of lining up each scene as if it were a word demanding a par-ticular placement within an individual sentence.

In his examination of cinematographic syntax, Metz identifies a passage in Pierrot lefou in which Jean-Luc Godard "is able to suggest with a great deal of truth, butwithout determining the outcome, several possibilities at the same time. So he gives usa sort of potential sequence - an undetermined sequence - that represents a new typeof syntagma, a novel form of the logic of montage,' but [one] that remains entirely afigure of narrativity."6 The sequence in question follows the two protagonists of thefilm as they flee a Paris apartment by sliding down a drain pipe and then racing offin a red Peugot. This passage "freely alternates shots taken from the sidewalk in frontof the building . . . with other images that, from the diegetic point of view, occurseveral minutes later in another location.7 Godard freely intertwines times andplaces, presenting several versions of the way in which the car emerges from the apart-ment building. Pinter takes his cue from this filmic splintering of narrative, but insteadof alternating several possible visions of a scene as Godard did in Pierrot le fou, hecomplicates the process even further by presenting several potential scenes simultane-ously. For example, at the opening of Act I in Old Times, the movie director Deeleyand his wife Kate anticipate the arrival of Kate's former roommate- and possiblyformer lover - Anna. But Anna already stands upstage, as if Pinter has merged filmshots of the scenes before and after dinner. For the audience, Anna is at once there byvirtue of the fact that she is physically present, and not there, since Kate and Deeleyignore her as they discuss her imminent arrival. Pinter merges these two shots, ofcourse, to present several possible perceptions of the moment. As Anna is foremost in

the minds of Kate and Deeley, she upstages them in the audience's mind as well. Andsince she is now a "given" n the married couple's life, she is simultaneously adangerous threat and hence one to ignore.

When Anna does burst out of her initial silence to converse with Deeley and Kate,Pinter uses the cinematic trick of skipping over time to a crucial moment. It is notimportant for us to see how Anna entered, so we simply witness her being there.

4 Interview with John Russell Taylor, Sight and Sound (Autumn 1966), quoted in Arnold P. Hinchliffe,Harold Pinter (Boston: Twayne, 1981), p. 131.

5Metz, Film Language, p. 100.

6Ibid., p. 219.7Ibid., p. 218.

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45 / PINTER AND THE SYNTAX OF CINEMA

Pinter might well have been discussing this moment in Old Times when he describedhis screenplay for Accident in 1966: "In this film everything happens, nothing is

explained. It has been pared down and down, all unnecessary words and actions areeliminated. If it is interesting to see a man cross a room, then we see him do it; if not,then we leave out the insignificant stages of the action."8

The suddenness of Anna's entrance into the dialogue is augmented by her initialchatter, which is crafted so that it drastically alters the slow, steady editing pace thatopens the play. Her speed strikes an even more shocking note because of the almostslow-motion coffee and brandy rituals that follow. First Kate offers coffee to Anna(and reluctantly to Deeley) and then, as if in retaliation, Deeley immediately poursbrandy for them all. These rituals seem to force the stage audience to see a close-up ofthe coffee cups and the brandy snifters, as if calling attention to their importance as

objects or weapons. Indeed, the ritualistic cups and snifters assume a magnifiedsignificance of their own, for Pinter cuts out the "footage" hat shows the charactersactually drinking their coffee. By creating this attempt at a close-up shot in the theatre,Pinter's script combats the static quality of the distance between the actor and theaudience, substituting for it the more varied relationship between the movie audienceand the film, which can alter point of view at will. As Keith Cohen explains in his Filmand Fiction, in the theatre "subject and object are part of the same living and playingspace; the distance, as well as the angle of vision, between the two [actor and spec-tator] remains static, while in film these spatial relations are extremely dynamic."9

Pinter's revolutionary filmic experiments with audience complement his efforts to

alter the distance between the audience and the play. Stanley Cavell, in The WorldViewed, argues that "the audience in a theatre can be defined as those to whom theactors are present while they are not present to the actors. But movies allow the audi-ence to be mechanically absent. The fact that I am invisible and inaudible to theactors, and fixed in position, no longer needs accounting for; it is not part of a conven-tion I have to comply with; the proceedings do not have to make good the fact that Ido nothing in the face of tragedy, or that I laugh at the follies of others."10 Pinter, Iwould like to suggest, uses several techniques that attempt to place the spectator in the"mechanically absent" position of a person viewing a film or a photograph. First, heconcentrates on filmic economy and polish in paring down stage business anddemanding of his actors a tight control of movement, thus approximating the closedquality of film performances. Actor John Normington might be speaking for any suc-cessful Pinter performer when he said of the Royal Shakespeare Company productionof The Homecoming, "economy is the thing .... We felt like a string quartet. Thatwe were very proficient. We could all play the score. We knew the tempos and we hadour conductor. We all knew exactly what we were going to do. There was no 'well trythis tonight.'"1

8Martin Esslin, Pinter, rev. ed. (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973), p. 193.9Keith Cohen, Film and Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 73.

10Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (New York: Viking, 1971), pp. 25-26.11 ohn and Anthea Lahr, A Casebook on Harold Pinter's 'The Homecoming' (London: Davis Poynter,1974), pp. 145-47.

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In promoting this refined, musically precise acting approach, Pinter tries tominimize the actor's actual presence on stage, a bodily presence which contradicts the

audience's temptation "to perceive him as a protagonist in a fictional universe."12Instead, he attempts to create the impression of reality offered by a film, whichsubstitutes the presence of the character for the bodily presence of the actor. As Metzexplains Jean Leirens' heory, film "does not depend at all on the strong presence of anactor but, rather, on the low degree of existence possessed by those ghostly creaturesmoving on the screen. . . [which] are, therefore, unable to resist our constantimpulse to invest them with the 'reality' of fiction (the concept of diegesis), a realitythat comes only from within us, from the projections and identifications that aremixed in with our perceptions of the film."13 Perhaps the clearest example of Pinter'senhancing the fiction of a character in this cinematic way arises when he leaves Annaon stage, mobile and very much alive, even after Kate's Act II statement, "I rememberyou dead." As in the opening scene, Anna becomes at that moment a felt presence, adistanced fiction whose reality the audience itself creates through reflection.

Another facet of Pinter's playwriting strategy which "mechanically" distances theaudience is his handling of character motivation. Instead of directly addressing the

object of their desires, the characters in Old Times drive their action through onecharacter to another.14 This oblique approach to interaction places the spectator at aremove from the third actor, the object of the action at any given moment. In OldTimes, for example, the actress portraying Kate must recognize that the stage directioncalling for her to offer Anna a cigarette does not necessarily indicate her desire to

please Anna, but rather her wish to punish Deeley, the odd man out at that time. Andwith her gesture she distances Deeley not only from herself but from the audience aswell. Just before Anna's arrival, Deeley places this phenomenon into a filmic contextas he admits to Kate that he plans to frame her and use her as a camera lens duringAnna's visit. He monitors his rival Anna through Kate: "I11 e watching you .. . Tosee if she's the same person."

By using pauses and silences to arrest the motion of the visual image on stage in OldTimes, Pinter creates a holographic effect, furthering his attempt to distance the audi-ence and create a more autonomous and therefore more "real" iction on stage. The

spectators experience what Roland Barthes calls spectatorial awareness, or the feelingthat "This has been real." 5 The playwright thereby seems to remove his spectatorstemporally as well as spatially from the unfolding action, and, paradoxically, makesthem perceive its reality more fully.

Pinter's alteration of modes of perception is further complicated by the fact that hetries to merge the linear process of perception (the syntagmatic step in the spectator's

12Metz, Film Language, pp. 9-10.13Ibid., p. 10.14 David Savran, "The Girardian Economy of Desire: Old Times Recaptured," Theatre Journal, 34, No.

1 (March 1982), 40-54.5Roland Barthes, Communications, No. 4 (1964), 40-51, discussed in Metz, Film Language, pp. 5-6.

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creative process when perceiving a succession of images), with the non-linear processof reflection (the paradigmatic step in the creative process when the viewer links

images that are not placed together in a sequence).16 For example, at the end of Act I inOld Times Anna prompts Kate to return with her to their girlhood and the twowomen suddenly drop into the past:

Anna: (Quietly) Don't et's go out tonight, don't et's go anywhere onight, et's tayin. Ill cook something, ou can wash your hair, we can relax, well put onsome records.

Kate: Oh, I don't know. We could go out.

Instead of simply providing a flashback, however, Pinter leaves the husband Deeleyon stage, fighting to reestablish the "present" nd his dominance over Kate. The audi-

ence, therefore, has to attempt to reflect on how the two competing scenes fit togetherif it is to perceive the reality of either fiction. (It must also, of course, eventually placeboth in the narrative that has thus far been disclosed.)

The cinema itself acts as a central metaphor in Old Times, with Deeley not only afilmmaker of sorts, but also a movie buff and a fan of Odd Man Out, the film whosetitle gives meaning to the game the characters play. Sometimes Pinter splinters thenarrative of Old Times by presenting a re-take of the action, as he does with the OddMan Out incident: Deeley's version of his movie outing with Kate is later viewed fromAnna's point of view. She contends that she, not Deeley, shared the movie Odd ManOut with Kate.

By using such cinematic devices, Pinter forges a new relationship between the audi-ence and the play, as he demands that the spectators view his Old Times not from onevantage point, as they might a more conventionally structured play, but from anynumber of camera angles. Sometimes the spectators watch from their own point ofview outside, sometimes from the various, continuously changing points of view ofthe three characters. As Walter Kerr contends, the audience begins to "share he anxi-ety of the characters whose lives we can observe but cannot chart. We no longer judgetheir collective state of mind. We inhabit it." 7 Instead of presenting one given set ofcircumstances (the crystal clear "who, what, when, where, why" of melodrama), oreven one slowly revealed, shifting set of circumstances (as in Ibsen), Pinter allows the

characters n Old Times to govern the circumstances regarding their background, theirrelationship with the others. But, of course, even within themselves these charactersdo not experience life in a unified fashion. They constantly renegotiate the scenes theyremember from their pasts, using what Jurij Lotman identifies as the second type offilm narration: "the transformation of one and the same shot."18 Anna, for example,first describes Deeley's movements in Act I as "quick" when she recalls or creates her

16Here I utilize Keith Cohen's explanation of the two processes, in Film and Fiction, p. 76.17Walter Kerr, Harold Pinter (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1967), pp. 20-21.

18Jurij Lotman,Semiotics

of Cinema,trans. Mark E. Suino

(AnnArbor:

University of Michigan Press,1976), p. 63.

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encounter with him in the bedroom she shared as a girl with Kate. But she immedi-ately reconsiders her picture of the scene and offers a revised image, suggesting that

"he didn't move quickly . .. that's quite wrong ... he moved . . . very slowly." AsAnna's speech reveals, the ground or given circumstances of Pinter's drama arediscernible only moment to moment, as the characters review and edit their ownscenes. Even the setting transforms, or rather splits, during the scenes of Kate andAnna's past together, as Deeley and Kate's country house becomes simultaneously thegirls' London flat. The actor must help the audience discern these shifts if either is toexperience the peculiar reality of Pinter's world.

In Old Times the actor must also prompt the viewer to contribute in a rather uniqueway to the creation of Kate, Deeley, and Anna. Though the audience must be engagedby any successful play, Pinter's Eisenstein-style montage approach to scenic develop-

ment alters somewhat the traditional audience involvement with the drama. Itrequires that the actor cue the audience to go beyond its initial impression that thescene has stopped during the pauses and silences. The actor must prompt his viewersto provide the forward motion (or sometimes the reverse motion) in their minds dur-ing the seeming stop-action of a silence: sorting, editing, replaying certain moments,reflecting on the past scenes and making their own syntheses of separate stage imagesor bits of dialogue. Pinter often posits situation A, allows for a pause or silence, thenpresents situation B, at which time the actor must signal that the audience is to createsituation C, a synthesis of A and B which does not necessarily exist on stage. Forexample, in Act I of Old Times, Deeley blurts out that 'Yes, you need good food in thecountry, substantial food, to keep you going, all the air ... you know." Then there isa pause, after which Kate states, "Yes, I quite like those kind of things, doing it." Thismoment derives its interest from the dialectic Pinter sets up in his montage.

Situation A: Deeley pretends o make polite conversation with Anna about he sus-taining power of food.

Pause.

Situation B: Kate voices that she enjoys "those kind of things."

Though the narrative impulse and the linguistic sign "those" ead toward Deeley's laterline, "Do you mean cooking?," the montage device demands that the audience syn-thesize the focus of situation A (sustenance) and B (the sexual suggestiveness of thephrase "doing it") to create C: Kate muses on the sustaining power of sex.

By allowing his characters to change the action's frames of reference at will, Pintercreates a new theatrical form demanding a new approach to performance. John Bury,the set designer for Peter Hall's Royal Shakespeare Company premiere of The

Homecoming, explains how Pinter

absolutely hrows out the whole of the Stanislavski chool of production nd acting. Underthe old rule you all sit down and you decide. And you decide maginatively set of givencircumstances. ou nvent your granny and your mother and your whole ife history, and

everybody's ot to know the mother and everybody's ot to agree o the same mage ofmother. Then when you all act, youll put mother on stage. And usually with Stanislavski

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one's working with a dead author or a translation, o you and the director ave to establisha given set of circumstances. his is the thing with Harold-there are no given cir-cumstances.19

This fact irritated certain American actors of the 1960's, accustomed to Stanislavski'smethod. Patrick Henry, after directing a 1963 Goodman Theatre production of TheBirthday Party, explained the difficulty actors faced if they used a Stanislavsky-basedapproach to playing Pinter: "Each actor was frustrated by his inability to determinewhy and how his character performed as it did within the framework of the play.""Pinter provides no past or future," so that discerning a 'logical line of development ineach character's behavior from the past to the time of the play" is impossible.20 Com-plicating this process is the fact that often Pinter's characters exist in two time framessimultaneously, as in Kate and Anna's aforementioned "girlhood" onversations pep-

pered with Deeley's attempts to cajole the women back to the present. At these times,a precise identification of "beats," o borrow Stanislavski's term, becomes difficultbecause for each woman there are two sets of motivations, one for the past scene andone for the present.

But what is the appropriate alternative to the Method? Pinter seems to demand thatthe actor study the character in some way. In his often quoted speech to the StudentDrama Festival in 1962, he explained that "between my lack of biographical dataabout [my characters], and the ambiguity of what they say there lies a territory whichis not only worthy of exploration but which it is compulsory to explore." 1 In examin-ing this territory the actor should avoid a preoccupation with the kind of character

definition found in Ibsen's scripts, and focus instead on Sir Ralph Richardson's descrip-tion of Pinter's plays as "a kind of shorthand, like a painting by Ben Nicholson ...suggestions of meaning." 22 nstead of determining the superobjective of the plot or thespine of his character, Sir John Gielgud, playing Spooner to Richardson's Hirst in the1976 London run of No Man's Land, decided to "accept he suspense and the surprisesand not worry too much about what it all sums up to," thus substituting "a ot of con-centration, and a certain attitude of mind"23 or the more traditional contemporaryperformance methodology. It is this "attitude of mind" and the process stemming fromit that can guide the actor in his creation of a Pinter character.

Pinter's cinematic approach demands that the actor in Old Times determine, not the

cause and effect narrative of the script, but the nature of the reality of the events in theplot. He cannot assume that everything that happens is true in the same way, sincePinter draws characters whose memories distort or merge occurrences and whose willscreate past events. A future event may even become a present reality for a Pintercharacter, as Anna's death becomes real at the end of Old Times. The problem of how

19Lahr, A Casebook on Harold Pinter's 'The Homecoming, p. 152.20Patrick Henry, "Acting the Absurd," Drama Critique, 6 (Winter 1963), 13.21Hinchliffe, Harold Pinter, p. 34.22Robert Berkvist, "What Does Pinter Mean? Don't Ask " The New York Times, 7 November 1976,

Sec. 2, p. 22. My emphasis.23Ibid.

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to perceive a real or imagined event in time is, therefore, central to the actor's study ofa Pinter play. Interestingly, each actor may arrive at a rather different conclusion

about the nature of the various events in the story line. For example, the actors play-ing Anna and Deeley may silently disagree about the nature of their possible pastencounters. Instead of clarifying the one "true" eading of the characters' elationships,the director assists each actor in deciding what camera angle he will take on eachevent, with the character's given circumstances changing upon every alteration inpoint of view.

In Old Times the actor encounters a character created in the moment only, acharacter whose reality is negotiable from moment to moment. Austin Quigley arguesthat Pinter's anguage creates this world, "primarily as a means of dictating and rein-forcing relationships," which "thus become major battlegrounds as characters attempt

to negotiate a mutual reality."4

Although Pinter's language certainly contributes tothis process, the non-verbal signs in the script, handled in a cinematic fashion, areequally important - and perhaps more important - as a means for the characters tofashion their contradictory truths and relationships with others. In his effort to dis-suade Pinter critics from concentrating exclusively on the referential function oflanguage, Quigley calls attention to Saussure's statement that any two linguistic signs"are not different but distinct. Between them there is only opposition."25 But Pinteruses not only linguistic signs in opposition to each other, but verbal signs in opposi-tion to non-verbal ones. In Act I when Kate delivers her line, "You talk of me as if Iwere dead," for example, the linguistic signs may index a peevishness on Kate's part,but the visual signs which precede the line drastically alter the seeming tone of the lineitself: "Kate tands. She goes to a small table, takes a cigarette from a box and lights it.She looks down at Anna" (my emphasis). The non-verbal cues tell us that Kate dolliesaround the set to establish her down-shot on Anna, demolishing Anna's importance ata moment of what would otherwise seem like defensiveness.

While the actions of a character in a well-made play generally line up in an orderlyand somewhat predictable fashion, the actors should notice that the Old Timescharacters jump from one motivation to the next without a smooth cause and effecttransition. During the silences there may be no visible stage business, but instead aflurry of actions or desires that the actors must hint at, all the while maintaining the

ambiguitythat

providesthe basis for Pinter's art. These motivations are often linked

by association, dream, or memory rather than chronological time or rational thoughtprocesses, which means that actors must present characters who suddenly age or shedyears, or even seem to exist outside of time as the past or future becomes the present intheir desires. For example, Anna's sudden motivation to lure Kate to the past with herline in Act I, "Don't et's go out tonight," s not so much a simple reversion in time as anattempt to hide from time, and from Deeley's observation. The scene develops asfollows: Kate, for the second time, tries to elicit a response from Anna to the question,

24Austin E. Quigley, The Pinter Problem (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 52, 54.

25F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. W. Baskin (New York, 1966), pp. 121-22,quoted in Quigley, Pinter Problem, pp. 58-59.

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"Do you like the Sicilian people?" Attempting to intrigue Kate by refusing to disclosefurther information about her life in Sicily, Anna stares at Kate, ignoring Deeley's

attempt to distract her. During the silence that follows, Anna imposes her camera eyeon the scene, finally powerful enough to lure Kate toward her on 'Don't let's go outtonight." Anna's motivation "to hide additional information" umps by association to"to hide with Kate," as Anna attempts to eclipse Deeley's vision of their relationship.

The seemingly obscure connections between one motivation and the next, createdby cinematic editing principles in Old Times, provide the actors with rich territory toexplore. It is in these moments that the actors can, perhaps, most clearly see theircharacters. Film critic Tom Milne might have been discussing Old Times when hewrote of Pinter's screenplay for Accident: "the characters refuse to be limited by whatwe are shown of them. The whole film is put together virtually without transitions,

using only direct cuts, and as with Resnais, it is in the gaps that the real story istold."26

Because these jumps in motivation are central to the play's syntax and vision, theactors must clarify that each character may choose any one of several particularmotivations at any given moment. Paul Rogers, who played Max in the Royal Shakes-peare Company's Homecoming, supported this idea in an interview with John Lahr:

Interviewer: I get the feeling as a member f the audience hat you're making up yourmind as you go along at every point, that you could go one of four or fiveways.

Rogers:That's

goodobservation. Because, f

course,hat's what the characters

are doing to each other.27

The actor must allow the audience to see a collage of motivations, then clarify whichprecise choice the character makes at each juncture. In addition, the actor has to findan analogue for the sudden changes in point of view in Pinter's dialogue. For instance,during much of Act I Deeley and Anna refer to Kate in the third person, indicatingtheir observation of her from a safe distance, as if to discern her reaction to their battlewithout getting burned.

Walter Kerr's comments on Pinter's structure in The Dumb Waiter call attention toyet another important task for the actor in a Pinter play. Kerr writes, "whatever action

is taking place must have no clear beginning.... Similarly, [it] must have noforeseeable future." 28Although the actor should, of course, avoid anticipating his cuesin any production, Pinter asks that his actors maintain their concentration on the pres-ent moment to avoid creating a closed narrative or shattering the character's eeminglycool exterior. Since the process of character creation replaces character revelation inPinter's Old Times, the actors must constantly threaten to rewrite the script their act-

26 Katherine H. Burkman, The Dramatic World of Harold Pinter: Its Basis in Ritual (Ohio State Univer-sity Press, 1971), p. 126.

27Lahr,Casebook on 'The

Homecoming,'p.155.

28Kerr, Harold Pinter, pp. 20-21.

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ing partners start, aware that they write separate scenarios and compete forphotographic accuracy in observation. By "believing n something that's just air," 29by

deciding something is true, the Pinter actors form their characters. They dare not con-fine themselves to a single spine for characters appropriately conceived in terms of"potency, possibility, movement."30 To convey character, then, the actors must relyheavily on the moment and movement, or on the decision not to move. Because ofPinter's cinematic techniques, however, this movement may be evidenced on stage asnothing more than an actor's shift in focus, as if the character were a camera lens.

Pinter's characters often do perceive each other in terms of visual images. Notice thevisually oriented diction and its relationship to character creation in the followingspeech by Len in The Dwarfs:

Whatyou

are, orappear

o be tome,

orappear

o be toyou, changes

oquickly,

o horri-fyingly, I certainly an't keep up with it, and I'm damn ure you can't ither. But who youare I can't even begin to recognize, and sometimes I recognize it so wholly, so forcibly, Ican't ook, and how can I be certain of what I see? You have no number. Where am I tolook, where am I to look, what is there o locate, so as to have some surety, o have somerest from this whole bloody racket? You're he sum of so many reflections.31

In Old Times as in The Dwarfs, each character shares Pinter's own penchant for being"the objective, meticulous recorder of the world around him." 32These attempts to seeare inextricably linked to the ability to perceive or enforce another's identity. At theend of Act I, for example, Anna acts as a camera eye, as she "stares" t Kate, coaxes'Don't let's go out tonight," and thus prompts Kate's transformation into her girlhood

lover. In accordance with cinematic principles, the nature of the person on whomAnna is focussed - Kate, in this instance - changes as she is observed. Utilizing theHeisenberg principle of indeterminacy, Pinter stresses the fact that neither Anna northe audience can be certain of Kate's nature, since the very act of observation alters it.

All too aware of this scientific fact, the characters n Old Times attempt to imposetheir own photographic realities upon each other. At the close of Act I, after Kate'sexit, Pinter dictates:

Deeley stands ooking at Anna.Anna turs her head towards him.They look at each other.FADE

Calmly they monitor one another, as if the very act of looking might allow them tooverpower or perhaps possess each other. Rather than catalogue the countless timesthis occurs during the course of the play, however, let us examine two central uses of ittoward the end of Act II. Anna reveals that upon returning home from an evening out

29John Normington, in Lahr, Casebook on 'The Homecoming,' pp. 149-50.30Kerr, Harold Pinter, p. 32.31Harold Pinter, The Dwarfs, in A Slight Ache and Other Plays (London: Eyre Methuen, 1968), p. 112.

My emphasis.32Martin Esslin, Pinter: A Study of His Plays, rev. ed. (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973), pp. 234-35.

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when she and Kate roomed together, she would tell Kate "anything of interest" hathad occurred during her outing. When Deeley asks "Did she blush then?" o determine

the accuracy of Anna's picture of Kate, she responds:I could never ee then. I would come n late and find her reading nder he amp, and beginto tell her, but she would say no, turn off the light, and I would tell her in the dark. Shepreferred o be told n the dark, what with the ight rom he gasfire r the ight hrough hecurtains, and what she didn't know was that, knowing her preference, would choose aposition n the room from which I could see her ace, although he could not see mine. Shecould hear my voice only. And so listened and I watched her listening.

Anna forces Kate, unwilling and unknowing, into a spotlight, so that she can observeher and thus control her. Aware of the power of observation, Kate prefers the dark somuch that Anna's disclosure triggers her revenge shortly thereafter: "I remember you

lying dead. You didn't know I was watching you." Thus, in one stroke, with nothingmore effortful than a new camera angle on the past scene, with the sole change thatKate discloses that she also acted as an observer, Kate wins the battle with Anna.

Pinter's conception of his characters as objective cameras prompts many critics tocall them dispassionate, when in fact they possess quite deeply seated emotions.Arnold Hinchliffe in his book Harold Pinter cites a Homecoming review in whichPinter is "accused of the same emotional coldness that is charged against AlainResnais . . . but like Pinter Resnais was seeking a new form, a new syntax." 33Pinter's

appropriation of the seemingly objective film vision, carefully altered by virtue of thefact that each character wields his own camera and can focus on fantasy, dream,

memory, as well as so-called present reality, provides the basis for a unique kind ofemotional exchange between characters. Pinter's avorite director, Peter Hall, claimedthat "the personal involvement of the actor in Pinter has to be deeper and more pas-sionate and more instinctive at a certain time in rehearsal, and then one has to coolit." 34It is hazardous to conjecture about a common reality in Pinter's plays, whichexplains why Kate attains her position of power through evasion, silently panning theevents as they transpire, applying all her energy toward the process of remaining unin-volved.35 In like fashion, the actors portraying Deeley and Anna must be careful notto allow a blow to register, as if their characters were just observers.36

Because of the fact that the Pinter actor must constantly maintain this superior view

of the events around him, he develops a self-confidence in his relationship with theaudience. Asked if he learned anything about acting from his work on The Home-coming, Paul Rogers replied: "Arrogance. Plain, bloody arrogance. I've played kingsand tyrants, Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, and God knows what. But never in a play was itessential in one's relationship to the audience to come and be, relentlessly, without athought of playing for any kind of sympathy, to be utterly arrogant and sure of the

33Hinchliffe, Harold Pinter, pp. 138-39.34Lahr, Casebook on 'The Homecoming,'p. 22.35After directing The Homecoming Peter Hall said of Teddy: "The amount of force he has to apply to

keepinguninvolved - that's the main

thing" (Lahr, Casebook on 'The Homecoming, p. 21).36See Rogers, quoted in Lahr, Casebook on 'The Homecoming,'p. 165.

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play, of yourself, and your own skill as a player." 37This arrogance lends a knife-edgeclarity to the stylized naturalism which actor John Normington describes as Pinter's

performance mode.38In effect, Pinter requires film acting on stage: the ability to undertake a number of

different scenes, not necessarily in chronological order, on one evening's "shoot"; andmore importantly, a distance from the audience and an awareness that economy andprecision are essential. Actor Paul Rogers agrees that Pinter's scripts call for "commaaccuracy." 39Peter Hall cites this need to avoid even the smallest irrelevant gestures asa return to style,40 hough it may also be compared to the need for film actors to avoidany inappropriate small gestures, since they are magnified a hundred times on thescreen. As in Robert Wilson's operas, inspired also by the slow-motion possibilities offilm, movement is enlarged, tone amplified, and therefore both must be even more

tightly controlled than the acting in a more traditionally realistic play with itscustomary abundance of non-verbal signs.

In Pinter, acting is behaving. Vincent Canby defines this term with regard to filmacting in a New York Times movie review:

Because of the nature of the camera and its ability to crawl into an actor's eyeball ifrequired, a lot of movie acting isn't acting at all in the ordinary sense. It's what AlexanderKnox once called "behaving," he simulation of being natural, of being devoid of irrelevantmannerisms that, if magnified a couple of hundred times on the screen, could suggestpsychosis rather than an incipient sneeze.41

Like filmactors,

Pinter's actors must hone their movements to acutting edge, carefullygranting import and urgency to those moments when they do choose to move. The

actor exploring Old Times achieves success when he moves, behaves, if you will, with

complete confidence and absolute control in a performance that would make anIbsenian actor appear baroque. With characteristic bluntness Pinter describes what hewants his actors to do: "I think what has to be done is just to play the damn lines and

stop, start, and move and do it all very clearly and economically."42 Pinter mightalmost be talking about something as mechanically controlled as a camera, signallinghis insistence on movement as movement, rather than as the outer manifestation of a

deeper meaning. As Kerr notes in his study of Pinter, the playwright has "accepted, for

practical dramatic purposes, the post-Greek proposition that the lip moves first and

that its nature as lip comes later - after the utterance and because of it." 43 Gesture inPinter is not a revelation of an inner motive; it is an act of momentary definition. Andthe mystery of Old Times stems from the fact that Pinter goes farther than in any of

37Lahr, Casebook on 'The Homecoming,'p. 153.38Ibid., p. 138.39Ibid., p. 153.40Ibid., p. 16.41 Vincent Canby, "In Film, Acting Is Behavior," The New York Times, 12 December 1976, Sec. 2, p. 1.42Michael Dean, "Late Night Line-Up. Harold Pinter Talks to Michael Dean," Listener, 81 (6 March

1969), p. 312.43Kerr, Harold Pinter, pp. 44-45.

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his other dramas to establish that fact, as is proven by the final scene in which silentmovement offers us the last glimpse of the characters, with the elusive Kate victor

over Deeley and Anna.As Patrick Henry discovered in his rehearsals for The Birthday Party, it may be dif-

ficult to convince actors of this need to avoid overintellectualizing about motivationand movement. The actress playing Meg in his production tried to make her businessof darning socks "dramatically valid," rather than "devoting her entire attention tosuch trivialities and then making this increased focus seem completely natural."44Oddly enough, this reliance on behavior does not mean that the Pinter actor isdoomed to being undramatic, however. Pinter himself explained in a 1968 televisioninterview that in some ways the impact of his characters' movements resembles thetheatrical effects engineered by a barn-storming actor like Donald Wolfit, with whom

Pinter acted in King Lear:I was playing one of Lear's knights, and I remember we were all pretty much in theshadows, with Wolfit standing n a very high rostrum with his back to the audience, withhis cloak. There was a spotlight n him. And at a certain moment it was the most tinglingexperience o be on stage with him and watching hishappen very night the cloak wouldfling right round. It was quite a shattering moment. It's hat taking of dramatic momentsthat was unparalleled. One doesn't see anything ike that these days, except for SirLaurence Olivier. And so far as I'm concerned, here are comparable moments n what Iseem to write. The moments are very exact and even very small, perhaps ven trivial aswhen a glass s moved from there o there. Now, in my terms feel that this is a very bigmoment, a very important moment. You haven't got the cloak, but you do have theglass.45

For the actor to take his dramatic gesture with the glass, however, he cannot allowhimself to be surrounded by a flurry of activity, nor can his own movement be justpart of a string of explanatory activities. His gestures must be not only precise andcontrolled, but also infrequent or sometimes half-restrained, so that the pivotalmoments will be accented. "Experts have long recognized," writes Walter Benjamin,"that n the film 'the greatest effects are almost always obtained by "acting" s little aspossible.' "46 Kate's initial immobility emphasizes her later courtship of Anna throughthe mere offering of coffee, just as Deeley's stillness is shattered when he dramaticallyupstages her with the nuanced brandy ritual. These very movements have a ritualisticquality, like the cigar-lighting or tea ceremonies in The Homecoming, and like them,they derive their meaning from the doing.

With Old Times Pinter forges a daring new theatrical form, borrowing fromcinematic art to revolutionize the stage. His incorporation of film techniques into hiscreative process challenges actors to respond in kind, to fashion an approach to per-formance which centers on movement instead of the Stanislavski-based "spine." His

44Henry, "Acting the Absurd," 14.45Lahr, Casebook on 'The Homecoming,' p. 39.46

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations (NewYork: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), p. 232.

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reliance on non-linguistic signs and counter-narrative challenges actors and criticsalike to explore new ways of discussing his plays. Crippled by their need to rely on a

system of linguistic significance to explore Pinter's complex sign system, in whichvisual signs frequently overpower linguistic or even verbal ones, Pinter critics and per-formers often depend upon metaphors to elucidate his work. Those metaphors,however, ought to share the objectivity and visual orientation, the mutability, of thescripts themselves, as the film metaphor which erupts in Old Times surely does. InOld Times Pinter offers his critics and his actors a clue as to how to behave.

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