We remodel our memories for the same reason we do our homes: to make them more inhabitable. When, for example, I recollect my time in London last fall I've forgotten that the beer I prefer in a certain Charlotte Street pub was tepid beyond taste (even by English standards), that the book stalls beneath Waterloo Bridge were shuttered because of bad weather, that the passed-out reveler on the Piccadilly Line was slumped, for nine stops, before a train-length sloshing of his own vomit. Instead I recall my time on the tube to be overcrowded but clean, the book stalls beneath the bridge replete with mid-fifties Faber first editions, the beer in the pub as cold as the River Thames in winter. “There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened,” remarks Anna, matter-of-factly, in Harold Pinter's Old Times (1971). “There are things I remember which may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place.”Anna, c'est moi.My own fraught relationship with the past, with what may or may not have happened there, makes me the ideal playgoer, I imagine, for Pinter at the Pinter, the months-long London production—in seven installments—of Pinter's short plays and sketches, many of which address, in however limited a scope, the succinct formulation put forth in Pinter Four, in Moonlight (1993): “The past is a mist.” The notion is one that Pinter noodled over for the length of his career, and which no doubt drew him to writing a screenplay about Proust (the chronicler of misty pasts par excellence), as well as a screenplay for L. P. Hartley's novel The Go-Between (1953), its memorable opening a taut observation about the once-was: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”The tense—do rather than did—is vital. It implies the past is never once, or was, but ongoing, in flux, ever remodeled according to mood or fancy or point of view, and therefore ever under construction: a cocktail of not quite hard fact cut always with a shot of fiction. As Faulkner famously said, “the past is never dead. It's not even past”—which is to say it's a contested territory to be fought over, conceded, forgotten, or won. Until, that is, the next battle ensues between, say, you and your spouse, there on the stoop, over the details of when you first met, and whether the first moment of intimacy was a loving look in the eye or a hand slipped up from behind, under the brassiere, in winter. Was it, you now wonder, her bare breasts you touched that night, on the bridge, long ago? Or another woman's? This is the situation of the sketch Night (1969), the penultimate performance of Pinter Three (directed by Jamie Lloyd), and for me, one of the most memorable (if, that is, my memory can be trusted).With a running time of approximately twelve minutes, Night encapsulates a handful of recurring themes surfacing throughout the thirteen works that comprise the third and fourth installments of Pinter at the Pinter, not least a longing to touch, and to be touched. Tom Edden and Meera Syal, who play the Man and Woman in Night, exude the kind of lived-in chemistry and quiet desperation of a couple with children and a waning sex life. Their attention toward one another, and the affection they once felt, has faded into mirrored excuses for needing “to be up early” because of “things to do”—utterances, I noticed, that provoked the audience at the Harold Pinter Theatre (made up mostly of couples who bore an uncanny resemblance to the couple on stage) into laughing the boisterous laughter of unease, of familiarity, of my god, that's us! They couldn't help but laugh, nor could I. The play is funny precisely because, in Beckett's words, there's nothing funnier than unhappiness—and under Jamie Lloyd's direction, along with the actors' joint ease upon a softly lit stage, in dress evocative of the age (mid-sixties tweed), funnier still. But there's something tragic about this sketch, too, maybe because life is always tragic when the one who adored us, who once declared, “I will adore you always,” no longer does, and perhaps never did.The Man and Woman in Night long for something lost, but not forgotten; something there in the wings, off-stage, on the edges of memory (“remember” is a refrain throughout, as it is in virtually all of the short plays mentioned in this review); a time when, imagined or real, they were once connected. Discernible in the pauses, which Edden and Syal liberally indulge, is the wish, in Forster's formulation, to “only connect”—to bridge loneliness, if not by way of touch, then by a shared past. In her poem “The Touch,” published the same year (1969) as Pinter's Night, Anne Sexton puts it this way: “An ordinary hand—just lonely / for something to touch / that touches back.” Sexton's own ordinary hand, we might imagine, stretched itself out like a bridge through the mist, in search of a caress, a connection to stave off killing herself, which eventually, inevitably, she did. In Pinter's world, too, the bridge between self and other disappears into the mist. The bridge, for example, on which the Man in Night remembers first touching the Woman is a bridge that the Woman herself is powerless to remember. For her it wasn't a bridge at all, but a “corner of a field … by the railings,” where the first touch took place. “You touched my hand,” the Woman remembers. “I touched your breasts,” the Man remembers, differently.If Night is played lightly (as are the other seven sketches in Pinter Three), with only its immense melancholy to weigh it down, then the headliners—Landscape, Monologue, A Kind of Alaska—are heavy in contrast, and reason enough to drink heavily during the interval in the theater's aptly named Moonlight Bar. Unlike the sketches, which are light by definition, these short plays are sobering and serious and humorless, apart, that is, from their unhappiness, which, we know by now, there's nothing funnier than.Opening Pinter Three is Landscape (1969), first produced the same year as Night; it, like Night, concerns a man and woman, but this time they have names: Duff and Beth. While the relationship between them is ambiguous, as most relationships in Pinter are, we might assume by their disconnectedness that they are married, and have been for quite some time. Performed superbly by Keith Allen and Tamsin Greig, who exhibit, respectively, just the right pitch of narcissistic rage and catatonic interiority, Duff and Beth are solipsistically incapable of communication with one another, never mind connecting. He bellows, in the way certain blowhard husbands do, and she, in her defense, has retreated fully into memory of a more loving, more accommodating past. He's profane: his conversation—if you can call it that—is mostly about shit (his word, not mine) and a lost dog and beer-barrel bungholes. She reminisces, for the entirety of the play, what for her must have felt like something sacred in comparison to what she's saddled with now. While he bellows, she never looks his way, nor acknowledges a word he's said, which is a common enough reaction to those whom we find insufferable. In a touch not prescribed by the script, Beth, but not Duff, speaks softly and without modulation into a microphone, which amplifies her thoughts in a way that makes them feel like interior recordings, rather than words spoken aloud. This in turn makes us feel as though we, the audience, are privy to what's inside Beth's head, in a way that Duff isn't, and can never be.Emerson, in his journals, wrote that who we are is what we think about all day long. Regarding Beth, she thinks obsessively and repeatedly about a romantic encounter from long ago, a brief affair in the dunes, by the shore, with a man who may or may not have been her (and Duff's) employer. Or maybe the encounter was with Duff himself, as he was, in the way back, well before the marital hardening—though this seems to me unlikely. For his part, Duff has been unfaithful too, but extramarital affairs are not what ails this dreadful union—if a union it is or ever was. The “true infidelity,” as the writer Philippe Sollers recently remarked in a forum on marriage (with his partner Julia Kristeva), “resides in the congealing of the couple, in heaviness, in the earnestness that turns into resentment. It's an intellectual betrayal above all.” You don't have to look far to witness such betrayals, those congealed couples you know—or know yourself to be—who complain they spend more time touching their screens than they do each other. In Landscape there are at least fifteen direct references to touch, though the two figures in the play never do—touch. And if Beth's interior monologue is the yearning of a woman who has gone for years untouched, but who appears no longer capable of expressing that yearning to anyone but herself, then Duff—all battering ram and bluster—appears relieved not to have to put out: “At least now … at least now, I can walk down to the pub in peace and up to the pond in peace, with no-one to nag the shit out of me.”In his early monograph Proust (1931), Samuel Beckett writes “We cannot know and we cannot be known,” an observation which the whole of Pinter's work, to one degree or another, addresses. When, in Landscape, Beth declares “I stood in the mist”—a line that looks forward to Andy's “The past is a mist” in Moonlight—she speaks, I think, for the ontological condition of us all. Because the past is a mist, we ourselves are, too. The “other” is not only the stranger you pass on the street, or the man with an accent from a faraway land, but the spouse with whom you've shared a bed for the last thirty years, the vindictive brother who inexplicably pinched your cheese roll, the freakish self you sometimes catch unaware in a side-length mirror, staring blankly back at you. The question then is how do we contend with such otherness? How do we live with it? “Love is the full recognition of the other in their otherness,” observes Philippe Sollers, but no such love, or loving recognition, is to be found in Pinter's world. Instead, there is only the other in their absolute otherness, as when the man (Lee Evans) in Monologue (1973) carries on admirably, and animatedly, with an empty chair, at turns defending himself against, while also recriminating, whatever presence, or presences, once lingered there. In the peroration of his monologue the man voices what I can't help but hear as Pinter's own personal advice for getting on in the world: “The ones that keep silent are the best off.”Above all, perhaps, Pinter was concerned with the way in which we wield language to belie truth rather than to reveal it (in Pinter's world “truth”—insofar as there is any—might be discernible in silences, but never in words).If, for example, I make note of the fact that Pinter at the Pinter coincides with the ten-year anniversary of the playwright's passing, then I'm quite certain that Pinter himself—were he around to hear it—would wince at my phrasing, the windy euphemism “passing” for the brute fact of his cancerous death in 2008 (and the day before Christmas, no less!). In 1962, in the oft-most-quoted passage from “Writing for the Theatre,” Pinter wrote: The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in place. When true silence falls we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness. Twenty years later he wrote A Kind of Alaska (1982), a one-act play about a woman in her mid-forties who has just awakened from a twenty-nine-year silence, “a temporary habitation … in a kind of Alaska,” her self-appointed caretaker calls it, during which time, he tells her, she has been “nowhere, absent, indifferent.”In many ways A Kind of Alaska parallels the dramatic situation of Landscape, so much in fact that Landscape might very well have been titled A Kind of Alaska, and vice-versa, without loss. This isn't to say the two plays are the same, however. They aren't. But it's easy to see the logic behind making them the bookends of Pinter Three, and that A Kind of Alaska, as the capper, makes for a nice visual segue into Moonlight, in Pinter Four. There's symmetry, too, in the casting: Tamsin Greig, who plays Beth in Landscape, returns to play Deborah, she of the twenty-nine-year silence. And Keith Allen, who plays Duff in Landscape, returns as Hornby, doctor to Deborah. The echoes are clear, and not easily lost on even a half-way attentive audience: Imagine, for a moment, if Beth suddenly awakened from her dreamy revelries (about the man who touched her lightly, lovingly, in the dunes by the shore) to find gruff Duff by her side, speaking, as he does, from topic to topic without the ligaments of transition—imagine all of this and you have the situation in A Kind of Alaska, a situation made more confusing—for Deborah—by the arrival of her sister Pauline (played by Meera Syal). Beth's longing to be touched is, in the character of Deborah, inverted into a suspicion of what's been done to her: “People have been looking at me. They have been touching me,” she tells Hornby. “You shouldn't have touched like that […] I shouldn't have touched you like that,” she laments. “You made me touch you,” she accuses him. None of this she can actually know (any more than we the audience can know), but she's right to be suspicious—as we all should be—of what's being said, of any claim for what did or did not happen to us in the past. As Pinter implies, and as Beckett states outright, we cannot know and we cannot be known.To move from Pinter Three to Pinter Four is to move from a stage set in which we see Deborah, in bed, awakening, to Andy, in Moonlight (directed by Lyndsey Turner), in bed, dying. If the past, and the people we encountered there (including our former selves), is, for Pinter, the great other, then so too is death—but kept out of reach, untouched, so long as we've breath enough for more words (as Andy has, on his deathbed). Robert Glenister plays Andy with all the self-pitying narcissism we expect—and are sorely familiar with (Sad!) in this age of Twitter—from a man who has lived his entire life faithfully believing he is, has always been, and will forever be the center of his, and our, existence. His rage against the dying light isn't that of Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich, however. There's never on his part a metaphysical reaching for the point of it all, only the depressed disbelief of a man in his eleventh hour, alone with his long-suffering wife (stoically played by Brid Brennan), braying at the bedside absence of his former mistress and wholly indifferent two sons.On the whole, the plays of Pinter Three and Four are directed both exquisitely and conventionally—each hugging closely the contours of Pinter's stage prescriptions, as well as consummately performed. However, there's one breakaway, the very last: a thrumming, percussive, lit-up departure from the usual form. Under the direction of Ed Stambollouian, Night School (1979) opens with three young women beneath bright lights, on a turntable, one of whom is seated at a drum kit, drumming loudly the beat of the nightclub where the other two women ply their trade as dancers for what (one assumes) are leering, low-life men. There is no mention, however, of a percussionist in the text of Night School, nor does the play, as scripted, begin in a nightclub (that comes later), but the tweaking works all the same. After Moonlight fades out, forlornly, to a soft rendition of Ella Fitzgerald's “How High the Moon,” Night School, following an interval, opens brazenly with sound and spectacle, two features of the theater that are not commonly associated with Pinter. Silence and dimly lit rooms, yes, but not sound and spectacle. The result is a level of energy—sustained by periodic bouts of the drummer beating her drum during scene changes—radiating from the stage that helps to intensify the comic corners of the play; an act-long crescendo that culminates in a deflationary close whereby nobody gets what they want—except for Sally, a young boarder who manages to extricate herself from one of Pinter's famed rooms of menace. Played by Jessica Barden (who, along with Tamsin Greig, you may recognize from the film Tamara Drewe [2010], a clever spin on Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd), Sally is all vim and seeming naiveté, a bulls-eye for the nearest manipulator, who, in her case, happens to be the man whose room she's been living in for the last four months.Pinter Four, unlike Pinter Three, is unbuffered by the light sketches that cushion the severity of Landscape, A Kind of Alaska, and Monologue. While I haven't space to detail all of these sketches (apart from what I've written already about Night), I recommend that you get hold of Pinter's story “Girls” (easily accessed online), performed as a monologue in Pinter Three. It concerns whether, in truth, “all girls like to be spanked,” and is entirely too discomfiting not to experience for yourself. As with the rest of the works from the third and fourth installments of Pinter at the Pinter, you will, I think, find it touching. Or untouching, as the case may be.