Pinter's New World

By Lawrence Malkin

NO MAN'S LAND by HAROLD PINTER

Two aging literary gents are discovered at wordplay in a womblike Edwardian salon. John Gielgud, the social-climbing guest, is a failed poet and garrulous pub bore. Host Ralph Richardson is a successful but dipsomaniacal belletrist blimp who keeps two menacing servants to guard against just such intrusions. Together these two titled mandarins of the stage are guiding us into Pinter-land, where words struggle to contain the open-ended flux of existence. Our journey through it is brilliantly illuminated by their partnership.

No Man's Land. Harold Pinter's new play at Britain's National Theater in London, explores the paradox between chillingly inflexible ideas and a reality so ephemeral that it may be false, and often is. What turns this grandiose philosophical dilemma into exhilarating theater is the fact that the play is very funny. Under Peter Hall's deft direction, the ominous and reflective pauses are delivered with timing and double takes of Jack Benny standard.

Prufrocks in Reverse. Using ordinary language and sometimes vulgar mannerisms, the two Prufrocks reverse their accustomed stage personae to hint at tenuous meanings as complex as any in Eliot's poetry. Gielgud, a seedy intellectual in beer-stained pinstripes, conceals his natural grace and authority under nervous movements--hitching up his pants, ruffling his sandy-haired wig, filching cigarettes. He babbles an obbligato of literary cliches in an excessively ingratiating attempt to establish human contact. Richardson's stock character, the failed dreamer, prefers to stay pick led in his past: his arm now is to "drink with dignity." This monument to frozen illusions suddenly shatters in not one, but two thudding, alcoholic stage falls. His identity crumbles like a building under the wrecker's headache ball.

Richardson can accept the experience of meeting a new person only by pretending his guest is someone he al ready knows, a fellow whose wife he once proudly seduced. Gielgud humors him with a sly expression of disbelief; his viola voice emerges to play, tease, and finally wound in a fumbled attempt at old-boy friendship. Richardson, ever the literary prig, rejects him: "Let us change the subject. For the last time." He commits his soul to his servants, two North London roughnecks with a sheen of airline-steward manners, and slides willingly into no man's land, "which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever, icy and silent."

Pinter people tend to live ineffably in the present and represent nothing out side themselves. Events have no proximate causes, let alone final Aristotelian ones. But in his last play, Old Times, Pinter's characters began to be defined by their uncertain memory of the past. Now the particulars of the present are beginning to be bounded by the dark inevitability of the future, the no man's land of death in life. The new and more abstract world that Britain's leading playwright has begun to explore at 44 is still imperfectly mapped, and he will no doubt travel in it further as he moves on into middle age. One hopes that he will once again be accompanied by such sensitive guides. . Lawrence Malkin

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