Pinter and Stoppard: A Director’s View

Abstract

Carey Perloff’s examination of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard in her book, Pinter and Stoppard: A Director’s View, reflects upon her personal as well as professional collaborations with the dramatists, spanning more than three decades. Grounded in the production process of several of their plays, which she directed in the United States on opposite coasts over the course of her career, she adds a unique perspective to the already large body of criticism on both men. Mediated by the collaborative nature of their works, she draws upon the production-specific encounters and some of the political dynamics shaping their careers as well as her own: the birth of her children, the events of 9/11, and the 2008 Recession. Particularly interesting and well explored here is the focus on the Jewish-European heritage of both men, a heritage the author shares with them. She emphasizes how she has “come to believe that being Jewish defined the gestalt of Pinter’s and Stoppard’s plays in specific ways that provide access and insight into the rehearsal room” (20). Part memoir of her extensive work with Pinter and Stoppard, she identifies many of the specific coordinates of that gestalt as the theatrical experience evolves for American audiences.The focus on Jewish heritage during and following the Second World War is interesting, not simply as biographical information but as recognition about how Jewishness consciously, in the case of Pinter, or unconsciously, in Stoppard’s case, has framed each man’s vision of human life. Speaking specifically of Stoppard, she identifies the “almost Talmudic belief in the power of language to impart knowledge” but then notes that this flavor is also true of Pinter. “Jews,” she says, “after all, are the people of the word” (43). In exhuming the influences of Jewish identity, before, during, and shortly after the World War II, Perloff reveals an engine that drives the plays as they move from one context, geographically and culturally, to another around the world. The “word” she reminds her readers is what diaspora Jews were able to carry with them when they were dispossessed of all else.Pinter was a third-generation Jewish immigrant surrounded by “a toxic antisemitism that had characterized British culture for decades” and that “continued well after the war from both sides of the political spectrum,” even into the present day (22–23). Contrary to what Americans generally believe about the British, who fought the Nazis from 1939 until 1945, and for a brief time almost single-handedly, there was an undercurrent of violence and resentment, in Pinter’s early life. Jews of Pinter’s generation, in the working-class neighborhood of London’s East End, fended off aggression with a thick-skinned repartee, confronted their burdens with dark humor, and supported one another with a fierce tribalism that was reinforced by religious practice. As Perloff describes this environment, I was reminded of living for a time during the 1970s in Israel amidst a conclave of British Jews, who had, following the Second World War, emigrated from cities such as London, Manchester, Birmingham, or Glasgow. Most were Pinter’s age or slightly older, many were from working-class families and almost excessively verbal, in Hebrew as well as English. Fond of parody and farce, they powerfully attuned themselves to the nuances of antisemitism, whether vocal or physical. They utilized the handed-down skills of the Jewish diaspora: word, wit, gesture, and yes, at times, silence. Like Pinter, they could be unsparing in their critique of power using parody and farce to illustrate their ideas. Their resistance to the everyday violence was also served by an insistent solidarity with other Jews.One of the most interesting aspects in the book concerns Pinter’s insight into that tribal ideal from which, Perloff claims, he creates flawed Jewish characters, like Goldberg. I first encountered The Birthday Party as a student in a midwestern Lutheran college. Goldberg’s rhetoric made me uncomfortable as I wondered what my classmates, already largely antisemitic, might make of him. In her text, Perloff suggests that the family relations in The Homecoming, in particular, show the conflict at the center of these characters’ lives—that is, surviving as the unwanted or unwashed within a larger national context—and how that struggle complicates familial love and intimacy. The demand for family solidarity and support underlies each individual’s existence in Pinter’s families, including the animosity that Lenny’s father and brothers show him, not only founded upon bringing home a non-Jewish wife but, more significantly, resulting from Lenny’s initial abandonment of his family. Immigrant Jews, and perhaps most minority communities, endure the hostile environment surrounding them by cleaving to one another, particularly within family arrangements. For better or for worse, that bond helps them shoulder the burden of existing as perennial outsiders.While Stoppard was for a time less likely to “embrace” his Jewish identity, his childhood included displacement from his native Czechoslovakia, first, to Singapore, then two years later, with his mother and brother to India. From India on, Stoppard’s father disappeared from his life, and eventually was recorded as deceased. Echoing Stoppard’s interviews about how word of his father’s death affected him, Perloff points to Guildenstern’s comment in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead that death, as the living experience of it, is simply the momentary and final disintegration of a person (38).As the child of European Jewish refugees also, Perloff takes up the question of why for much of Stoppard’s career, his Jewishness remained largely invisible, not only in his work but also in his identity. Stoppard’s mother deflected much of her Jewish experience after marrying her second husband who was English, but not Jewish. Perloff relates to the experience by recounting her own “refugee relatives who refused to acknowledge that being Jewish had been the cause of their persecution” (46). Considering whether the denial represents “survivor’s guilt, . . . a desire to ‘fit in’ . . . or self-loathing on his mother’s part,” she finally decides: “Probably all three things pertained” (47). In the light of contemporary trauma theory, there might be a fourth prospect added, that of the trauma of the displacement itself. Revisiting any single factor of one’s persecution without unearthing another more painful one might be motivation enough to steer clear of any memory of the trauma. That Stoppard eventually delves into that Jewish legacy is explored in later plays, such as India Ink and The Hard Problem. Perloff is able to explore with the playwright themes as he attempts to uncover, even to excavate, his buried past.The book then memorializes the collaborations, making an account of what happens when European Jewish streams commingle and play out in the theatrical experience.