Translations from the Unconscious

In a Pinter play, the questions are the answers. The denouement is total uncertainty. The audience knows less at the end than it thought it knew at the beginning. Harold Pinter provokes a devilishly clever sort of participatory theater in which the playgoer is lured into playing detective without any clues.

Consider the plot of Tea Party, a one-acter that, along with The Basement, is being offered off-Broadway. The central figure is Sisson (David Ford), a middleaged, successful British manufacturer of bidets. A self-made man, he prizes decisiveness, precision, strength of character. A widower, he marries a genteel second wife (June Emery) and hires a miniskirted, sexually provocative secretary (Valerie French) in the same week. He invites his wife's brother (John Tillinger) into the firm. His wife becomes her brother's secretary, and the pair indulge in faintly incestuous reminiscences of days on a gracious country estate--but are they really sister and brother?

Meanwhile, Sisson's secretary, who quit her previous boss for continually "touching" her, incites Sisson into making groping passes. As the sexual tension increases, Sisson suffers double vision and temporary blind spells and takes to blindfolding himself with his secretary's scarf. At an office tea party, Sisson's wife and secretary delightedly lie down on Sisson's desk while the brother touches them with gentle intimacy. The unseeing Sisson stiffens catatonically in his chair and may just possibly be in his death throes.

The surface is never the substance in Pinter. The plot is merely a presentment of an inner state of being, a translation from the unconscious. In The Party, Pinter is governed once again by his vision of woman as the sexual aggressor. The secretary is pallidly but visibly related to the praying-mantis wife in The Homecoming. The character of Sisson was almost perfectly described by Cyril Connolly in The Unquiet Grave when he wrote: "A puritan is incomplete because he excludes that half of himself of which he is afraid, and so the deeper he imprisons himself in his fastidiousness, the more difficulty he has in finding a woman who is brave enough to simulate the vulgarity by which he can be released."

But Sisson does not really want to be released. He cannot face his own sexuality. He makes "sanitary wares"; the messiness, disorder, and illogic of deeply felt emotion are profoundly threatening to him. And so, the force personified in the secretary releases him but also destroys him.

The Basement is a simpler play and almost too pat. A man named Law (Ted van Griethuysen) sits reading a book of illustrated Persian erotica. An old chum, Stott (James Ray), shows up. The pair chat in laconic Pinter fashion for a while, and then Stott asks if he can bring in a girl friend. Jane (Margo Ann Berdeshevsky) enters, and she and Stott promptly strip, get into Law's bed and make love. Law goes back to his book of Persian erotica.

Gradually, guerrilla warfare breaks out between the two men over the woman, the weapons being outsize marbles and broken milk bottles. Law makes, and makes off with Jane. At play's end, Stott sits reading the Persian erotica. There is a knock at the door. It is Law; the cycle is now complete. But are they perhaps homosexual buddies who have finally got rid of the divisive woman?

The meaning will lie in the eye and mind of the beholder. The mirror is the message. The playgoer will see what he wants to see, which, even in these lesser plays, is Harold Pinter's subtlest hold on him.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.