Programme Cover
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The Dwarfs, Young Vic, London, July
1972
Pete - Ian Taylor
Len - Richard Warwick
Mark - Niall Buggy
Production - Peter James
Design - Brenda Hartill Moores
Lighting - Liz Wells
This play was part of a double bill, with The
Wound by Ted Hughes.
The Dwarfs
by Michael Billington
Can radio drama ever work satisfactorily in the theatre? The question
is prompted by the Young Vicís latest double bill which consists
of two works first heard on sound radio: The Wound by Ted
Hughes and The Dwarfs by Harold Pinter. Both are fascinating,
densely-textured plays; both are eminently worth reviving; but both
appeal primarily to the mindís eye and suffer, in theatrical terms,
form a good deal of verbal redundancy.
The Wound, particularly demands to be heard or read rather
than seen. It consists of the complex, nightmarish fantasises that
whirl and eddy through a soldierís mind as he lies wounded on a
battlefield: he imagines himself and his sergeant lured into a white
chateau by a bedizened Queen, assailed by ghostly women who are
victims of war and taken on a Kafkaesque trip through glittering
ballrooms and honeycombed corridors. Highly visual stuff, you might
say. But the point is that Hughesís extraordinary language, flinty
muscular and tough, paints the necessary word-pictures for one:
when one sees the fantasy concretely embodied, one is in the world
of Powell and Pressbergerís ëA Matter of Life and Deathí or Mercury
Theatre poetic drama of the late 1940s. Peter McEneryís production
is undeniably fluent and imaginative. The diction has an almost
Websterian directness and pungency (the desert is like ëraw mustardí,
migraines are ëlike branding-irons that bear down on your eyeballsí).
But all the time I felt the words were describing things I could
already see for myself. Theatrical poetry, as Eric Bentley said,
is not the dramatic situation poetically expressed: it is the dramatic
expression of the poetic that lies in the situation.
Pinterís The Dwarfs has an even more complex history. It
has gone from novel to radio play to much-revised stage play. And
its fascination is still that its triangular male relationship provides
a summation of several territorial invasions, the battle for supremacy
that exists in any, close-knit relationship, the identity crisis
that accompanies the passage from adolescence to maturity. The soliloquies
of Len the character undergoing a breakdown, also give one a powerful
sense of madness closing in, oddly reminiscent of ëThe Ordeal of
Gilbert Pinfold.í Again, however, the work is structured for radio:
even Peter Jamesís admirable production cannot disguise the fatal
pauses as the actors scramble around in darkness to assume new attitudes.
The Guardian, 18th July 1972
with kind permission Michael Billington
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