Programme Cover
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The Dwarfs was first performed on
BBC Third Programme
2 December 1960
Len - Richard Pasco
Pete - Jon Rollason
Mark - Alex Scott
Produced by Barbara Bray
The play was first presented on
the stage by Michael Codron and David Hall at the New Arts Theatre,
London, 18th September 1963 in a double bill with
The Lover
Len - John Hurt
Mark - Michael Forrest
Pete - Philip Bond
Director - Harold Pinter
Assistant Director - Guy Vaesen
Settings and Lighting - Brian Currah
Michael Forrest and John Hurt
Harold Pinter is far the most original, as
he is also the most accomplished, of the younger generation of playwrights.
And lately he has added to his other remarkable qualities an extreme
formal eloquence. This quality will not, I suppose, endear him to
he sterner of my younger colleagues, who regard formal eloquence
as a sign of frivolity. They are all for ragged ends edges and untidy
ends. But for those with any feeling for shape this addition to
Mr. Pinterís range is an uncommon delight. It first showed itself
clearly as a development in his writing in The Collection,
that sadly under praised little masterpiece which the Royal Shakespeare
mounted last year.
The same quality, even further developed,
is there in The Lover, the first play in this double bill
of his, now at the New Arts. The Lover has a similar wholly
satisfying completeness, a similar absolute economy of means to
produce a similar precision of effect. The little play works simply
beautifully, like a perfectly adjusted piece of miniature machinery
ñ except that machinery is dead and this play is scintillating alive.
In his earlier plays Mr. Pinterís deceptively simple exchanges distilled
menace to a degree quite extraordinarily out of proportion to their
face value. In this play he uses his personal brand of dialogue
to distil wit. The menace is there, too, perhaps under the surface
of the wit; and the wit, in any case, is not vapid. It is peculiarly
revealing and provocative. The Lover has the magistral authority
of a marriage which eventually merge into one. It follows Blake
in suggesting that what a husband wants in a wife is what he finds
in a whore, ëthe lineaments of gratified desire,í however they may
be achieved.
Like the second of the two Osborne plays for
England, it brings out into the open the fact of how much so-called
perversion there is in so much so-called normal sexuality. But it
does this with an elegance and a wit which Mr. Osborne didnít command,
or, fir that matter, aim at. For, where Mr. Osborne is a moralist
who must give rein to his imagination, Mr. Pinter is an analyst
and a stylist. Mr. Osborne rails at life. Mr. Pinter notes its pattern
and arranges it.
Michael Forrest, Philip Bond, John Hurt and Harold Pinter on
the set |
There are only two characters in The
Lover, though there appear to be three ñ the wife, the husband
and the lover. But the lover who arrives at the little house at
Windsor every afternoon is, in fact, the husband wearing a different
persona. He enacts the lover for her: while she enacts for him the
whore. And in the end the two aspects of their marriage, the domestic
and the passionate, merge into one.
This dazzling little play receives the dazzling
acting it demands and deserves. Miss Vivien Merchant provides a
perfect miracle of delicacy in her acting of the wife. Her exquisite
touch and timing have the marvellous dexterity of a billiard player
making close cannons, where the faintest, hardly observable shift
of balance in wrist or stance make all the difference. Scott Forbes,
as the husband, is for the most part her match, though in this high-class
battle even the slightest first-night nervousness shows up plainly.
But the tensions these two create out of the most carefully calculated
simplicities are a wonder to watch. A play and a performance of
marvellous subtlety and excitement.
The Dwarfs, the second play in the
double bill, is another matter altogether. Its origins as a Third
Programme play are irreducibly present: it doesnít (like The
Lover which originated on the television screen) assimilate
itself to the stage. For those comparatively few who are prepared
to listen, it offers a quite different kind of reward, the reward
of a heightened prose of a quite remarkable quality excellently
delivered by John Hurt. Mr. Hurt plays an introverted young intellectual
caught in his own fancies in which a gang of dwarfs dominate his
interior life. Two extrovert friends offer him from time to time
the futile advice to pull himself together; and his encounters with
these two has that quality of underground violence which underlies
all Pinter confrontations.
But the young manís fantasies, admirably written
as they are, are reflective and descriptive ñ they havenít the rhetorical
stage feeling and they demand in the audience which it is perhaps
not prepared to give, though is would be rewarded if it did.
I would suggest that the two plays would be
better played in the reverse order. The audience would be fresher
for the more demanding ordeal of The Dwarfs, and they would
come away happier with the exhilaration of The Lover as the
last taste in their mouths.
The Financial Times, 1963
with kind permission
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