The First Last Look in the Shadows: Pinter and the Pinteresque

Anne Luyat

I have never really understood the difference between comedy and tragedy. Because comedy is the intuition of the absurd, it seems to me to be more despairing than tragedy. Comedy offers no means of escape. (67) Eugène Ionesco

1. Introduction

It was long thought that Harold Pinter had explained the essence of his drama and its Pinteresque nature. When he was asked, during an interview, “But what would you say your plays were about, Mr. Pinter?” he replied, “The weasel under the cocktail cabinet” (Taylor 105) and his answer, which was thought to refer to another critical term, the “comedy of menace,” soon became a staple of criticism and reaction to his work. However, in his acceptance speech of the 1970 Shakespeare Prize in Hamburg, West Germany, the dramatist set the record straight and explained that although his answer seemed to have acquired a profound significance over the years, the remark about the weasel under the cocktail cabinet for him meant “precisely nothing” (1987, 1). The danger of applying any label to a Pinter play, including the Pinteresque is more clearly seen with hindsight than with foresight. As Pinter himself realized, the need to fall back on a word or a beau mot sprang from a society that placed its faith in both. It is not surprising that the word Pinteresque has had a long run as a critical term. The work of Marc Shaw, for example, argues for an expanded consideration of the Pinteresque in The Dumb Waiter, which would include tragic-comedy. In his essay “Unpacking the Pinteresque in The Dumb Waiter and Beyond,” Shaw explains that the term applies to modes of feeling as well as to cerebral modes and runs the risk of 232 Anne Luyat

“reducing to a lone signifier everything that reverberates in every Pinter room.” On the other hand, Shaw also believes that Pinter benefited from the label the critics had coined for him and explains that: “The initial reviews performed Pinter a service by preparing his audience for a new experience.” Forewarned, play-goers were receptive to Pinter’s innovations, but the opaque nature of the word Pinteresque, which inadvertently gave as much prominence to the author as to the play he had written, could not have prepared them for the probing exploration of the human condition that they were to see on the stage, one which contributed a critical and ethical force to performance. Shaw quotes Zarly-Levo’s definition of the Pinteresque, which contains three main elements: Pinter’s atmospheric gift (usually an atmosphere of menace), his mastery of rhythmic, powerful dialogue and his authority to make an audience accept unexplained acts. In addition, Shaw suggests a fourth concept, the one which I found to be the most interesting because it focuses on the critical and ethical nature of Pinter’s drama: “the potential destruction of an individual who contends with authority.” I would agree with him when he says that although many comic elements, including routines that are reminiscent of vaudeville, can be found in The Dumb Waiter, the fate of Gus, a man who asks too many questions, is at the heart of Pinter’s interest in the play. It is not surprising that Pinter adapted characters in his plays whom he had played as an actor in repertory theater: ”When I was in rep years ago, I always played the sinister parts. My favorite was an MI 5 man, immaculately dressed, with a moustache” (Pinter qtd in Gussow 23). Nor is it surprising that in Pinter criticism the term “comedies of menace” preceded the term Pinteresque. The critic Irving Wardle in the review Encore of September, 1958 was the first to speak of comedies of menace with reference to Pinter, although the term itself had already appeared a year earlier as the subtitle of a play by David Campton called The Lunatic View, (Hinchcliffe 73.) What is often forgotten, however, as Steven H. Gale has pointed out, is that the comedies of menace revealed “the terror and loneliness of the human situation” (qtd in Almansi and Henderson 89).