The Latest Pinters: Less Is Less

In the past, the silences in Harold Pinter's scripts have often suggested more than the words he has written. Now, in two short plays premiered in London by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Pinter has in effect written the silences and let the words fill in suggestively. Such a drastically reductive approach yields spare shards of poetic realism, reminiscent of the prose of Joyce and Beckett. But it also demonstrates a rather arid point: in esthetics it is not always true, as Mies van der Rohe once said, that less is more. Sometimes it is less.

The curtain raiser, appropriately titled Silence, presents two men and a woman (Anthony Bate, Norman Rodway, Frances Cuka) seated in the disembodied setting of a hazily mirrored stage and backdrop. They all have monologues to recite about loneliness and remembered passion. But each monologue is fragmented, interspersed with the others, phrased, sometimes from the point of view of age, sometimes of youth--and always arranged around tense, troubled silences. Under Peter Hall's sensitive direction, it soon becomes evident that Pinter is using these jagged aural spaces to signify not only the passage of time but also the distance between people and the emptiness of their worlds. But where does he go from there?

On Separate Islands. He goes into the more substantial second play, Landscape. Here an estranged servant couple (David Waller, Peggy Ashcroft) are living in a now empty house in the country, measuring out their middle age in walks to the pub and vigils by the window. Their respective emotional landscapes--again, sketched in interlocking monologues--are as refracted as John Bury's setting, which strands them on separate domestic islands in the same wide kitchen.

She remembers with exquisite intensity a deserted beach, a lover's touch, "the silence of the sky in my eyes." He gives a bluff account of a pond in the nearby park, some sniggering adolescents, the excrement of ducks. Dame Peggy makes her lines into the soliloquy of a Molly Bloom. Both casts have to make the most of the unspoken word, but the best-modulated pauses of all are hers.

In the end, Landscape, like Silence, offers only what it offers in the beginning: skillful but schematic juxtapositions of crudity and tenderness, aspiration and loss, memory and desire. Their meaning may be clear, but when they are left undeveloped and unresolved, such juxtapositions are all workmanship and no play. The audience gets the point--but it gets very little else.

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