Primal Pinter

By T.E. Kalem

THE HOTHOUSE by Harold Pinter

Every Pinter play--from his earliest one-acter, The Room (1957), to his latest drama, Betrayal--begins on a note of nervous apprehension. What proceeds after that is not the unfolding of a plot but the revelation of a state of being, a kind of black comic hell consisting of menace, panic, boredom and absurdist non sequiturs. His characters are caught in seemingly desperate and openly despairing situations that cannot be ameliorated and that may end in psychological or physical violence.

Except that it is Pinter's funniest play, The Hothouse conforms to all of these characteristics. Written in 1958, it was Pinter's second full-length work. He withheld it from production at that time but, upon rereading it in 1979, decided that it was stageworthy. Pruned by the author but not rewritten, The Hothouse is being given a briskly polished U.S. premiere by the Trinity Square Repertory Company in Providence, R.I. It provides a fascinating embryonic glimpse of the themes, characters and even scenes that occur in such other Pinter plays as The Birthday Party, The Caretaker (which is currently being given a spotty revival at Manhattan's Roundabout Theater) and The Homecoming. Even more startlingly, this skillfully articulated drama prefigures the spate of British plays (notably Peter Nichols' The National Health) that have dwelt on the inner chancre of an impotent Britain's decline and decay.

The setting is a mental sanitarium. The head office is guarded by a maximum-security chain-link fence suggesting a concentration camp; sheaves of yellowing files conjure up a strangulating bureaucratic maze. Roote (George Martin), the government official in command, is a slightly dotty ex-colonel given to gung-ho sloganizing, lapses of memory and bouts of paranoia. His second in command, Gibbs (Richard Kavanaugh), lusts for Roote's post, is as obsequiously duplicitous as lago and possesses the mental cast of a Nazi stormtrooper. Miss Cutts (Amy Van Nostrand), the head nurse, is one of Pinter's Venus's-flytraps. She is Roote's mistress, sleeps with Gibbs and toyingly teases Lamb (Dan Butler), a naive underling whom Gibbs brings to slaughter in the cruel finale.

What do these people do, mostly? They talk. What is the play about, possibly? Birth and copulation and death (all offstage). This is not the only hint of T.S. Eliot's influence on Harold Pinter, since a good many of the lines have the weary, dying fall of Eliot's poems. Always in Pinter, the dialogue is the drama, and it follows a threefold pattern. The source of the first is his fondness for vaudeville, a predilection he shares with Samuel Beckett, a playwright Pinter vastly admires. The second is the inquisitorial mode: a character is grilled, mocked and menaced. The third is the puncturing of rote responses to reveal emotional vacuity. When Lamb asks Miss Cutts how she gets on with Roote, she replies, "Oh, such a charming person. So genuine." When he later asks her what Gibbs is like, she parrots: "Oh, he's a charming person. So genuine."

Remarks about the British malaise ricochet through the play, some elusive, some symbolic. At one point Roote is told that the intercom sounds "a bit clogged up," and he barks: "What's the matter with this place? Everything's clogged up, bunged up, stuffed up, buggered up. The whole thing's running downhill." Adrian Hall's staging runs in another direction: straight ahead, and smooth as a Rolls-Royce. Though the entire cast is exemplary, George Martin's Roote is exceptional. With his foggy look, sagging belly and mouth-watering delivery, he is the very model of a modern Colonel Blimpie. --ByT.E.Kalem

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