Now and in England

Harold Pinter’s most recent play‚ No Man’s Land, had its first performances in 1975 as part of the repertory for spring and early summer of the National Theatre, at the Old Vic in London. With an extraordinary cast that includes Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson, directed by Peter Hall (successor to Lord Olivier as the head of the National Theatre), it quickly established itself as a play one must see (who would not want to watch the Knights at play in all their virtuosity?) and hence almost impossible to see, given the limited number of seats and performances. In mid-July it was detached from the repertory and sent off to the West End for an independent run. Eventually, following in the hoofprints‚ so to speak, of Equus‚ which also had its beginning at the National Theatre, it will make its way to New York.

How audiences there will respond to Pinter’s irretrievably English play remains a matter of conjecture, for unlike Equus, it offers no fringe benefits in the form of frontal nudity, pyrotechnical staging, or Laingian psychology made palatable. With dazzlement at the performances‚ I would guess, assuming that the English cast is brought over intact, and with perplexity, not entirely unjustified‚ at its elusive subject. After all‚ “But what does it mean?” was the question being asked in various touristic accents (French‚ Danish‚ German‚ Indian, and American) at the Old Vic last summer‚ and very likely that will continue to be the question—especially at those post-performance seminars that were inaugurated in New York back in the days of Waiting for Godot, and are now an expected feature of any play with even the faintest claim to intellectual distinction, whether on or off Broadway, or at a university campus in Connecticut‚ Ohio, or California.

No help was forthcoming from the author himself: when it was a question of meaning, mum was the word. No Shavian, elucidative prefaces for him! I mention Shaw because, as it happened, one of the greatest of Shaw’s plays‚ Heartbreak House, written during World War I (thirteen years before Harold Pinter was born), was in the National’s repertory at the same time as No Man’s Land. To see the two plays—one an established “classic‚” the other at the beginning of its existence—only a few nights apart was to be made forcibly aware of the differences in procedures of the older and the younger playwright.

Of course, Shaw was not only a great playwright, he was also a great teacher, with an unshakable belief in the power and value of rational thought, as behooved a man born in the age of Victoria, and it was very much his intention that he not be misunderstood. Hence those prefaces that are themselves masterpieces of English expository prose; those detailed descriptions of characters and settings; those elaborate stage directions—most of which were faithfully adhered to by John Schlesinger in his production for the National Theatre.

I quote from Shaw partly for the sheer pleasure of it, partly as a way of arriving at Pinter.

First, the opening of the preface: “Heartbreak House is not merely the name of the play which follows. ... It is cultured, leisurely Europe before the war.” Second, from the final scene of the play itself, as the bombs are about to fall, almost but not quite on the Shotover house in “the hilly country in the middle of the north edge of Sussex”:

HECTOR HUSHABYE: And this ship we are all in? This soul’s prison we call England?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: The captain is in his bunk, drinking bottled ditchwater; and the crew is gambling in the forecastle. She will strike and sink and split. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favor of England because you were born in it?

Brief though they are‚ these two quotations should make clear the deeply symbolic nature of Shaw’s play, and the specific meanings that attach to his use of symbolic devices. Down to the least detail his pedagogic intelligence is alert. Shaw allows no leeway for “interpretation” of what he means. Not only does he see to it that his metaphoric pronouncements reinforce his meanings and strip them of ambiguity (the ship will “strike and sink”) but he guards against any possibility of being misunderstood by explaining his play in advance.

If Shaw, by choice, then, became the great “explainer” in the theater‚ Pinter has chosen to be the great “mystifier‚” whose plays are famous (notoriously so, even to the point of parody) for their meaningful silences, their unanswered questions, their ambiguities, their symbolism admitting a multiplicity of interpretations. But this anarchic privilege of making his plays mean whatever one wants them to mean (traditionally, they are parables of “the human condition‚” taking place anywhere, at any time) does a considerable injustice to the achievement and particularity of No Mari’s Land.

The title—as symbolic as Heartbreak House— has its historical resonance, of course, taking us back to World War I‚ when the phrase was descriptive of that bleak, blasted space on the Western Front between the German trenches and the trenches of the Allied Forces. But Pinter is not writing a “war” play, no more than was Shaw, and his setting is not a battlefield but a very handsome drawing room, elegantly furnished—a great sweep of four windows in a semicircular bay, curtained in green velvet— in a fashionable quarter of London. This might be Heartbreak House revisited, “now and in England,” after two decimating wars and two further decades of social, financial, moral, and imperial attrition. What do we find there?

Two men in their sixties‚ Hirst and Spooner, the former nattily dressed and evidently the host, for he is pouring drinks, the latter in “a very old and shabby suit; dark, faded shirt, creased spotted tie.” Hirst (played by Richardson) is a successful man of letters, very rich and very drunk —in fact, an alcoholic on his way, in this first act, to total incoherence and stupor. Spooner (played by Gielgud) is also a man of letters, sprightly where Hirst is ponderous, gabby where he is taciturn, and a failure where Hirst is so notably, in his expensive drawing room, a success. In fact‚ Spooner is the epitome of the potentially gifted writer who has talked his gift away over countless pints in countless pubs. And it is in one such pub‚ the haunt, as he himself puts it, of “a particularly repellent lickspittling herd of literati,” that the two men have met by chance for the first time earlier in the evening, and have adjourned, since closing time, to Hirst’s large house in NW1.

When the play begins‚ Hirst, pouring whiskey at the cabinet, asks, “As it is?” and Spooner replies, “As it is, yes please, absolutely as it is.” This casual exchange of stereotyped phrasesprecisely what one says in such a situation, the offer of a drink in someone’s house—might serve usefully as the motto, or epigraph, or signpost for Pinter’s play: “as it is,” the true subject of No Man’s Land. The crucial question, then (and how large it looms, for even when Pinter appears to be explicit in his symbolism he is a long way from being Shavian), is quite simply, “What does Pinter mean by ‘as it is’?” To which one might fairly reply, the condition of life, “now and in England.” That latter phrase, out of the armory of politicians and poets (it turns up, as readers of Four Quartets will remember, in “Little Gidding”), is heard early in No Man’s Land, one of the literary echoes that Pinter has strewn like landmines through his text. (Indeed, the relevant passage from Eliot might have served him as an alternative epigraph: “There are other places/ Which also are the world’s end. . . ./ But this is the nearest, in place and time,/ Now and in England.”) Having risked this much‚ I hasten to add that Pinter’s “as it is‚” being allegorical, makes no claim to reproducing in documentary fashion the world one encountered leaving the theater in London last summer.

That Britain is suffering yet another of the crises that have plagued the country since the end of World War I would have been clear to all but the most unobservant of visitors. One read about it in the newspapers; one heard about it from friends and acquaintances. The symptoms are familiar in outline from the past, but considerably more pronounced: spiraling inflation, the value of the pound declining, industrial strikes and slowdowns, an even more oppressive burden of taxation that weighs most heavily upon the professional and middle classes, threatening their extinction. Very likely Britain will “muddle through‚” as it has done so famously in the past; but the possibility that it may not looms specterlike in the middle distance, and accounts, perhaps, for an atmosphere in which depression and a kind of strident gaiety are intermingled—the atmosphere that Pinter evokes so skillfully and disturbingly in No Man’s Land.

Hirst and Spooner—the one a success‚ the other a failure—are merely opposite faces of the same social coin: both belong to the class of gentlemen‚ as their accent (still a decisive indicator in English life) immediately proves. And both are powerless. They are the captives (in a quite literal way) of Hirst’s guardians/nurses/caretakers— Foster, a man in his thirties, and Briggs, a man in his forties. When these two‚ who complete the cast, enter in the middle of the first act and begin to speak, we know, thanks to the decisive indicator, that almost certainly they are thugs‚ and certainly not gentlemen. Yet these are not the good-hearted Cockneys that Shaw would have beckoned into being (as‚ for example, the burglar in Heartbreak House) to signify the lower or working class. They are new men‚ flat, quasi-transatlantically accented‚ sinister, and outside the boundaries of class. “A good work of art tends to move me‚" says Foster. “You follow me? I’m not a cunt, you know.”

Poor drunken Hirst, poor gabbing Spooner, measured against the threatening‚ hinted-at realities of Foster and Briggs—how frail and anachronistic they seem, survivors from a discarded history. “All we have left‚" savs Spooner, “is the English language.” and together he and Hirst are allowed by their creator to offer a virtuoso display of language in action, resonant, allusive, echoing (deliberately) Henry James. T. S. Eliot, and others of the pantheon, the conventions of upper-class theater dialogue, on the battlefield and in the drawing room. So we have Hirst and Spooner featly footing it among echoes—resorting to parody, the form that remains to them after the substance has gone—and able, as if by magic, to become a variety of stock characters in any number of stock situations. For a single example: the stiff-upper-lip convention‚ which extends in a line from Journey’s End to In Which We Serve‚ and which in 1975 is closer to idiocy than heroism:

“You did say you had a good war‚ didn’t you?”

“A rather good one, yes.”

“How splendid—Destroyers?”

“Torpedo boats.”

“First rate, kill any Germans?”

“One or two.”

“Well done.”

But mastery of language is no salvation, when it becomes an end in itself. And in due course, the real end comes; Foster and Briggs are finally in control: “Nothing else will happen forever.” Or, as Spooner is allowed to put it more eloquently, speaking an epitaph for Hirst and himself: “You are in no man’s land, which never moves, which never changes, which never grows order‚ but which remains forever, icy and silent.”

We have come a long way from the end of Heartbreak House and Mrs. Hushabye’s joyous cry: “But what a glorious experience!” A lot of time and history have intervened.