Harold Pinter's Party Time

White G. D.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317195757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Arti performative

'All you have do is shut up and enjoy the hospitality.' Terry

Harold Pinter 's Party Time (1991) is an extraordinary distillation of the playwright's key concerns. Pulsing with political anger, it marks a stepping stone on Pinter's path from iconic dramatist of existential unease to Nobel Prize-winning poet of human rights.

G. D. White situates this underrated play within a recognisably 'Pinteresque' landscape of ambiguous, brittle social drama while also recognising its particularity: Party Time is haunted by Augusto Pinochet's right-wing coup against Salvador Allende's democratically elected government in Chile.

This book considers Party Time and its confederate plays in the dual context of Pinter's literary career and burgeoning international concern with human rights and freedom of expression, contrasting his uneasy relationship with the UK's powerful elite with the worldwide acclaim for his dramatic eviscerations of power.

1

Incident at dinner

‘All you have to do is shut up and enjoy the hospitality[.]‌’¹

In 1985 the American playwright Arthur Miller was the guest at a reception held by the American Ambassador to Turkey while on a visit to the country on behalf of the writer’s organisation PEN International. Miller had made the journey with the British playwright Harold Pinter, and the two of them had been sobered by what they had heard from relatives of writers imprisoned under the ruling military dictatorship. Raising concerns at the reception about the treatment of political prisoners, Pinter got into an argument with one of the guests over the use of torture in Turkish prisons.² In a later discussion with the Ambassador, who sought to articulate the US administration’s support for a Turkish government whose country bordered Soviet Russia, Pinter was told that ‘you have to bear in mind the political reality, the diplomatic reality, the military reality’. ‘The reality I’ve been referring to’, Pinter replied, ‘is that of electric current on your genitals’.³

Pinter described the incident in an essay titled ‘Arthur Miller’s Socks’, written for the American playwright’s 80th birthday. In it Pinter contrasts strongly the two writers’ approaches to the same question on this visit – how to confront oppressive power? For Miller, the answer came in a direct but measured use of his guest status during his invited speech, which considered how support for an authoritarian regime clashed with the United States’ declared commitment to democratic values. For Pinter the answer came in taking a different kind of opportunity – to make a point, employing the directness of the irascible argument, the provocation of outrage, the flouting of convention.

The moment of the possible confrontation between power and the relatively powerless, between authority and those who hold that authority to account is quintessentially dramatic. It demands that the figure who asserts the essential truth of a situation speak that truth to power, and step across a line of politeness and evasion, of obfuscation, or of refusal. It is at the heart of drama from Sophocles’ Antigone to Shakespeare’s King Lear, to Miller’s own The Crucible. As I write, the British media has been focused on the visit of the Chinese President Xi Jinping to London among a flurry of trade deals. The issue of quite when or how the delicate negotiation of the Chinese government’s human rights record might be conducted, and who – British Prime Minister or British leader of the opposition – might raise it has been widely picked over, but it is unlikely that such a drama of diplomatic confrontation will be played out in any public setting. That powerplay is likely to be conducted backstage, in diplomacy’s private antechambers.

Harold Pinter’s 1991 play Party Time focuses on this kind of moment in a portrait of the private social interactions of the powerful. The play takes place at a party where we observe the small talk of a privileged group. At first hearing that small talk is all about what binds the group together – the membership of an exclusive club, the enjoyment of particular leisure activities, the approval of a certain kind of strong governmental – and personal – behaviour. At the same time the small talk aims at the avoidance, until the party’s celebratory climax, of some kind of nasty business that has been going on out in the streets. This is revealed to have been a round-up, a restoration of order. The play shows us a gathering in which the codes of conduct and the holding of power are all based in the performance of language, and it is through the maintenance of languages’ ability to control, cajole, mask and flatter that power is gained and withheld among the group. And yet, in the calm of the elite surroundings, there are persistent notes of dissent and unease, in particular a question from a guest that continually threatens to upset the even tone of the gathering.

DUSTY: What’s happened to Jimmy?⁴

Party Time is an exploration of what binds a power elite together and of what threatens to fragment it, and it is in the recurrence of the question of what happened to Jimmy – and of whether what happened is something that can or will be talked about – that Pinter’s play gains its nightmarish effect.

The wave of largely non-violent revolutions that swept eastern Europe in 1989 is characterised by images of power discomfited and forced to account for itself, from East German border guards responding with bemusement to the crowds of demonstrators demanding to cross the Berlin Wall into the West to the uncomprehending concern of Nikolai Ceaușescu faced by disruption and booing from a crowd in front of the presidential palace in Bucharest in the same year that signalled the end of his regime. Pinter’s play first appears in the aftermath of these moments, premiering at the Almeida theatre in Islington, London in 1991. By making such clear reference to political circumstances the play seemed to be part of a shift of focus, somewhat out of step with the body of work that had built Pinter’s reputation. The play did, however, share obvious concerns with examining the broad questions of power, authority and human rights that had become an explicit part of his writing since 1984’s One for the Road. That piece depicted a brutal but urbane interrogator destroying a family of dissidents in a dance of menace and threatened violence. Along with its successor, 1987’s Mountain Language, in which a group of dispossessed people are intimidated by an army of the powerful, the work suggested Pinter’s emerging concern with political oppression. Irving Wardle’s review of Party Time indicates how it works both to anatomise a way of speaking and to illustrate that this appeared to be a new synthesis in the playwright’s work:

He has at last constructed a bridge between his dramatic world and the world of his political conscience. Party Time may be unlocalized, but it reflects the reported iniquities of Africa and Latin America in the perspective of a London he knows inside out.⁵

In a 1970 speech on being awarded the West German Shakespeare prize Pinter famously spoke of how a remark he once made about his work had come back to haunt him:

Once, many years ago, I found myself engaged uneasily in a public discussion on the theatre. Someone asked me what my work was ‘about’. I replied with no thought at all and merely to frustrate this line of enquiry: ‘The weasel under the cocktail cabinet’.⁶

Whether intentional or not, Pinter’s remark captured in metaphor that mixture of social sophistication and hidden violent unease that characterised his work from the 1950s territory of The Room; through the series of domestic interiors that mark his trio of plays, The Birthday Party, The Caretaker and The Homecoming; to the chilly middle-class landscapes of the 1970s dramas, including Old Times, No Man’s Land and Betrayal. The shifting sands of this territory were his habitual dramatic landscape, and the sense of ambiguity and menace that characterised them gave rise to the coining of a critical commonplace for his style – the ‘Pinteresque’. This term stood for the portrayal of a world in which lurking, upsetting dangers broke the social surface to raise ambiguities and uncertainties in human identity and relations; successive plays featured characters bursting, like Lenny in The Homecoming, into moments of violent, expressionistic savagery in language, if not in deed. That Pinter subsequently regretted ever using the ‘weasel’ phrase did not lessen its usefulness for readers seeking meaning, teachers discussing the work with their pupils or directors and actors hunting through the language and uncertain action of his plays to fix interpretation.

Pinter had already made a remark that was to prove similarly unhelpful for him. His reluctance in an earlier stage of his career to offer up explanations of his work and methods in interview had led to the collected published editions of his plays generally containing an introduction taken from a public lecture. These remain some of the most compelling outlinings of dramatic writing in print, but, like the territory of the Pinteresque, they also contain challenges and contradictions. In the 1962 speech to the National Student Drama Festival, which was initially published as ‘Writing for the Theatre,’ the introduction to his first volume of Collected Plays, Pinter stated ‘What I write has no obligation to anything other than itself’,⁷ an apparent disavowal of the theatre’s commitment to engage socially. Again this provided a critical context for the consideration of Pinter’s work. It was not to be read for a political subtext. There were no puzzles of attribution, or direct correspondences between the predicament of a character and the political climate of the times in which the play was written. If a particular production were to suggest political resonances might be drawn – if, for example, Stanley’s persecution in The Birthday Party were explicitly staged as a metaphor for Eastern Bloc doublethink – this was a by-product of the universality of the subject matter being explored, not a direct reference to external reality or the key to a system of interpretation for the work. Yet if Pinter were to regret the statement about the weasel, how much more was he to regret, and to challenge and revise, this statement about the theatre’s obligation? By 1984 Pinter was working on One for the Road, the first of a series of plays that was to usher in an era of very direct ‘political’ writing, in which the modes of address, the subject matter and the styles of his work were to make clear, if tangential, references to particular political environments and circumstances – shifting yes, metaphorical of course, but written by all accounts from the understanding of specific events. In the conversation between Pinter and the publisher Nick Hern that prefaces a 1985 edition of the play, Pinter makes clear that the apparent absence of politics in the preceding period was not quite as it may have appeared, and that political acts and political concerns had always been deeply embedded in his life and writing.⁸

Perhaps it was the trip to Turkey, his engagement with PEN International, and his communication with writers such as the Czechoslovakian dramatist Václav Havel whose political circumstances restricted their freedom of expression that brought home to Pinter the potential of writing, the exploration of language, and the taking of a position of dissent as issues that could be explored dramatically. Or perhaps the poetic images of lives arrested and decayed in the trilogy of Old Times, No Man’s Land, and Betrayal had already begun to suggest a need to shift the focus away from the landscapes of the interpersonal toward the public. Whichever, it is documented in Pinter’s obituary by his biographer Michael Billington⁹ that in 1973 Pinter was persuaded by theatre associates (including the playwright David Mercer and the actor Peggy Ashcroft) to speak out against the coup led by General Augusto Pinochet that overthrew Salvador Allende’s democratically elected left-wing government, a foundational moment in his understanding of the ways in which the spoken and the written might clash with the extreme exercise of power.

As a student I spent a good deal of time at the repertory cinemas of London – buildings like the Rio in Dalston, the Everyman in Hampstead, and the Scala in Kings Cross – on a cinema circuit that predated the DVD age and that provided a space in which cinema’s canon of classics, arthouse, and cult films were recycled long after their initial theatrical release. It was at the Rio that I watched the Costa-Gavras film Missing, starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. Set in Chile after the 1973 coup, the film deals with the ‘real-life’ story of Joyce and Ed Horman, wife and father of an American journalist, Charles Horman, who disappeared in the aftermath of Pinochet’s crackdown. At the time the film was engrossing, enraging, and enlightening. It followed the journey from innocence to experience of the Christian Scientist father as he grew steadily more aware of the injustice of that coup and of his own government’s apparent complicity in the events that led to the death of his son. Horman also grew to recognise the heroism of his daughter-in-law – Spacek plays a character called Beth who is based on the Joyce Horman of the real events – and the moral strength of the son he had taken to be a waster. I’ve not seen the film since, but at the time it changed my view of politics, in part because of its moral intensity, the clear depiction of a link between political expediency and callous human cruelty. I’ve no idea what I would make of Missing if I saw it now – and if it’s anything like Costa-Gavras’ later Music Box, another admirably intentioned film, I suspect I might find it rather less compelling – but it had its effect at the time. Since then I have become more sceptical of direct political messages and solutions. I am not easily led to see art as a substitute for life, or polemic as a substitute for compl...