Harold Pinter's Politics: A Silence beyond Echo (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Harold Pinter's Politics: A Silence beyond Echo Mark Taylor-Batty Charles Grimes . Harold Pinter's Politics: A Silence beyond Echo. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005. Pp. 259. $49.50 (Hb). In Pinter's only novel, The Dwarfs, first drafted in the early 1950s, the character Pete berates his friend Mark for "operating on life and not in it" (79). The novel represents a biographical exploration by Pinter of his teenage associations, and the accusation is highly likely to be one he himself fielded from one of his more challenging acquaintances. Charles Grimes's Harold Pinter's Politics: A Silence beyond Echo charts how Pinter has explored the opposition between operating in a detached manner and engaging directly in interpersonal and political issues; this opposition is central to an understanding of his political expression. Suggesting that "Pinter's political theatre could be viewed as emerging from a submerged or subtextual dialogue between his disconnected and his politicized self" (19), Grimes considers how this tension manifests itself both in the playwriting it underpins and in the manner in which audiences are invited to interact with those plays in performance. The first book of its scope, Grimes's study surveys Pinter's political writing and social engagement with a near-comprehensive sweep. Grimes contextualizes and separates Pinter's early plays (The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter, and The Hothouse) from the writing deemed to be his first truly committed theatre (Precisely, One for the Road, and Mountain Language); he then considers later plays that enact the consolidation of a powerful elite (Party Time, Celebration, Press Conference, and The New World Order). Later chapters offer crucial asides on Pinter's screenplay writing (focusing on The Comfort of Strangers and Victory) and directing (Taking Sides and The Trojan War Will Not Take Place). While the book provides excellent analyses of the individual plays, the study leads incrementally and satisfyingly towards the final, accomplished, chapter-long study on Ashes to Ashes, which serves to provide not only a most compelling interpretation of this play—Grimes positions it as both "a summary and crowning achievement of Harold Pinter's theater" (195)—but also a neatly structured conclusion to the monograph. Grimes starts by positioning Pinter's writings within the context of the British political theatre of the mid-to-late twentieth century and within the Brechtian and Shavian traditions that inform that context. He demonstrates how Pinter has consistently positioned himself in opposition to those traditions, which Grimes considers symptomatic of the writer's intuitive distrust of ideological statements. "Pinter's political awareness," Grimes asserts, "is born out of passionate moral observation of the world and its horrors, rather than an intellectual commitment to a systematized ideology" (160). He seeks to classify Pinter's political [End Page 458] and moral focus, emphasizing that the political plays deal not simply with the confrontation of the individual by the social world but more explicitly with the self-gratifying wielding of power (most explicitly through the use of torture) by the politically dominant in order to manage the dissident voice. He considers the plays in terms of the moral challenges they offer to their audiences, stating that they "dare us to contemplate" either "the destruction of progressive action" (101) or "the possibility of political change without the reassurance that power will necessarily destabilize itself" (119). A variety of modes of reading are applied to the works addressed and a host of theoretical models or paradigms are invoked. Though the approach is predominantly literary, Grimes frequently employs a lucid metacritical mode that positions the plays as cultural artefacts, articulate as both literature and theatre. The performative aspects of Pinter's expression are consciously foregrounded, though this foregrounding is often limited to considering instances of performance rather than the manner in which the plays might be constructed to engage their audiences. Some textual readings are supported by pertinent and enlightening material from drafts of the plays kept in the Pinter archive at the British Library. The book maintains a balance between objective handling of its subject and deft, original readings of the work. For example, while Grimes's discussion of The Birthday Party does not limit the play...