BEING HAROLD PINTER
WE are a whingeing, over-privileged, spoilt mob here in Sydney and no mistake. We might have opted to change governments but we’re still only too happy to be comfortable and relaxed and heaven help anything that gets in the way of that. Nowhere was this more evident than at Belvoir St Theatre last night (January 6) for Belarus Free Theatre's Being Harold Pinter. It was the first performance of the opening production of this year’s Sydney Festival – and Moaning Minnies au go go. (Too hot, surtitles rolling too fast, couldn’t read the top line of same, after-show snacks not up to scratch; is this kind of play really relevant? Is this the way to start a summer festival? Yada yada yada.)
Let’s put things in perspective. Yes it was hot – it’s Sydney in January; yes, it helped to be a speed reader to catch all the surtitles, if you were so inclined; yes, the upper rows at Belvoir are tricky and maybe the screen could be lowered a smidgeon; post-show gobblers are way too picky if they didn’t enjoy the delicious snacks supplied free by local eatery Vini (they alternate with El Bulli) along with the free drinks from Yellowtail/Casella Wines. Without them Moaning Minnies would be paying for their own. T’would be interesting to see how many would hang about the foyer if the freebies dried up.
Contrast all that with the way Belarus Free Theatre normally works: in constant danger of arrest and abuse, organising clandestine rehearsals in the apartments or other loaned premises of friends and supporters; staging performances in similar ways which are notified to audiences via email and SMS. Members of the company have been fired from their jobs for participating in the work and without the vocal support of international superstars such as Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter, their lives would be even more perilous than they already are. Yet they continue undaunted to produce art theatre of a kind and calibre we can only dream about. Assuming we could be bothered to wake from the generally dreamless torpor that envelopes this gruesomely complacent society.
Okay, so what was it all about anyway?
The play is the already fabled Being Harold Pinter which is performed by the extraordinary troupe from Minsk (which should be twinned with Harare, home of the world’s other horrible, pathetic dictatorship). The piece was adapted by Vladimir Scherban from plays by Harold Pinter and inspired by his 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature lecture (excerpts from which are also part of the text along with verbatim commentary from Belarussian political prisoners and dissidents). Like all their productions, it was first performed, secretly, in Belarus (in 2006) and has since been seen in Greece and London – where a performance was attended by the seriously ailing Pinter.
Why Pinter – the so-called playwright of the pause? Why would a politically-motivated company be so inspired by him? Let’s back track a bit to put the playwright in context.
Harold Pinter died on Christmas Eve aged 78. He was unique in contemporary 20th century writing for theatre and film because he began his career as an actor in the now extinct dramatic training ground of the English provincial repertory circuit. These experiences gave him insights and instincts into plays and players that were not – and are not – available in a conventional drama school (he went to RADA briefly but despised it) or in any other form of schooling for stage or screen. And not least because he worked at all kinds of menial jobs to supplement meagre wages, he also was steeped in the language and rhythms of everyday life at the rougher end of British society. This experience was to coalesce and emerge virtually fully formed from the very beginning of his playwriting in The Room (1957) in which characteristic bleak comedy and tension are intermingled as the outside world impinges on an anxious recluse.
It was first staged in Bristol as a post-graduate student production and had been written quickly for his friend Henry Woolf while Pinter was appearing in rep in Separate Tables, the Terence Rattigan tragi-comedy of oblique and fractured manners and emotions (a scenario that in itself is straight out of Pinter!).
It instantly led to tyro producer Michael Codron taking on The Birthday Party to stage it in London (at the Lyric Hammersmith) in 1958. The result was one of the most famous bombs in modern British theatre as every critic except Harold Hobson (Sunday Times) panned the play. It lasted just a week and was gone when Hobson wrote what was in effect an obituary for the play and commented: ”Mr Pinter, on the evidence of this work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting theatrical talent in London.” Thirty years later, when the critic died, Pinter spoke at his memorial service and said the review had caused him to continue to write rather than give up on the spot.
Born Jewish in London’s East End in 1930 when the Nazis were on the rise in Germany and the UK wannabes, Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts, were rampant in London, you could say Pinter was born political. Although so much of his writing for the stage was, on the surface, about the mundane and the ordinary, there was nothing mundane or ordinary about it. In truth it was saturated in the unexpected and unexplained menace of the everyday – something that had not been explored or captured by contemporary drama at that point. He was also preoccupied, obliquely, with the uneasy effect of power – wielded and experienced – on human beings.
Because of his iconoclastic and uncompromising approach to dialogue and drama, Pinter’s plays have been relentlessly interpreted, reinterpreted, mangled, illuminated and generally chewed over from the beginning. The overtly political plays of his middle career have not been seen in Australia, in the main, and his passionate approach to politics was sometimes ridiculed in Britain. (He was a committed activist for PEN, he opposed the invasion or Iraq calling Tony Blair a mass murderer and likened the Bush administration to Nazi Germany.) But those political plays have been seen in many countries around the world with first hand knowledge of fascism and political oppression.
In 1984 he wrote the prescient One For The Road which elliptically depicted the inner torture of the torturer; in 1988, Mountain Language explored the restrictions on free speech in Thatcherite Britain in a play inspired by the oppression of the Kurds in Turkey; and in Being Harold Pinter it becomes part of the Belarussian curtailment of freedom of speech. Party Time (1991) revisited Thatcher’s Britain by considering the casual indifference of the comfortable bourgeoisie to the erosion of civil liberties (a play that should surely have been staged in Australia any time in the past decade but was not).
Ashes to Ashes (1996) was the most successful of the “political plays” in which the personal and political are shown to be one and the same when secrets of a love life are intertwined with Bosnia, Auschwitz and the other all too easy atrocities of the 20th century. And it too features prominently in Being Harold Pinter.
In effect then, what Belarus Free Theatre offers us (in Australia) in this powerful, absorbing work is a crash course experience of Political Pinter 101. For that reason alone it’s important and worth every scrap of attention you can give it. It’s also a glorious demonstration by actors who understand and utilise the power of simplicity, commitment and immersion in the world of the stage. They communicate, despite the considerable language barrier, through the physical semiotics of theatre and the play which is by turns poignant, funny, shocking and tragic.
Nevertheless, pravda – truth – is a word members of an English-speaking audience would probably recognise and it’s repeated often in Being Harold Pinter. The question of truth also opens Pinter’s 2005 Nobel lecture and also forms the opening scene of the play. Truth is an important consideration in this instance and Belvoir gives its female patrons a comfortable moment to ponder it by displaying this Pinter observation at eye level on the doors of the loo cubicles: “The search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right then, on the spot.”
Company B at Belvoir St does this in its own admirable way through Neil Armfield’s seemingly eternal quest for pravda – homegrown and imported – and, with the Sydney Festival, in bringing Belarus Free Theatre with their remarkable work to Surry Hills he has done something even more remarkable than usual.
This month there are undoubtedly going to be many instances of “you must see” but in this case, missing Being Harold Pinter is to miss out on some greater truths and ideas about truth. If you haven’t already done so, you may find Pinter’s 2005 Nobel lecture illuminating and provocative too, especially when he cites the difference between truth in drama and truth for the citizen. Here’s the link to the pre-recorded lecture (introduced by his friend and fellow playwright David Hare) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5779318336871023559 .
