“Something Is Happening”: Medical Realism and the Problem of Acting in Harold Pinter’s A Kind of Alaska

Abstract

Harold Pinter’s A Kind of Alaska outlines and responds to a critical dilemma in the relationship between modern drama and medical practice. Focusing on a clinical encounter between a doctor and a patient, Pinter’s play was inspired by a real-life medical case history taken from neurologist Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings. Its engagement with medical reality, however, is disturbed by the aesthetic effects of Pinteresque dramaturgy, which subtly undermine the play’s presentation of bioethical dilemmas that are determined by authoritative acts of diagnosis and the control of doctor-patient communication. Reviewing the history of medical vision alongside theatrical realism reveals a paradoxical emphasis on pedagogy and unlearning within both traditions, wherein naïve acts of empiricism and a dutiful adherence to material presence are meant only to reinforce prescribed conclusions and extant structures of knowledge. A Kind of Alaska responds to this paradox by eliciting mutually exclusive attitudes toward narrative and acting, juxtaposing realist effects with those borrowed from the Brechtian Lehrstücke. As a result, the play challenges the kinds of closure implicit in both clinical vision and history, prioritizing instead the dialectical indeterminacies necessary to both the learning and the practice of medicine.