Programme Cover
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First produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company
at the Aldwych Theatre on 2nd July 1969 with Silence
Beth - Peggy Ashcroft
Duff - David Waller
Directed by Peter Hall
Set Design and Lighting - John Bury
Costumes - Beatrice Dawson
Paradise lost
by Harold Hobson
Every spectator will be immediately struck by the similarities -
between Harold Pinter's two short plays, Landscape
and Silence, which were presented at the Aldwych
last week. But Mr Pinter does not watch cricket for nothing. He
knows how to bowl quite different deliveries with the same action
of the wrist.
Both are quietist plays. In the first, three people, and in the
second, two, sit on chairs and talk, less to each other than to
the audience than to themselves. In each play what is talked about
is remembered, things: brief love affairs illuminated by fleeting
shafts of fading sunlight, or wan and grey in the invading dusk
of age and feebleness. Both in Silence
and Landscape the smooth surface erupts into
one of those bravura passages about ordinary matters-the barrelling
of beer or the mystery of a bird perched on a tree- for which Mr
Pinter has been famous for ever since his rhapsody on the Number
19 bus at Dalston Junction in The Caretaker. In either play the audience
has to piece together into some sort of shifting coherence the fragmented
details of the partly recollected past, and in each case what is
important is not the past, but the continuing influence that this
past exercises on the present which is before our eyes on the stage
of the Aldwych Theatre. It is in this present that the great difference
between the two plays lies.
One gets the first suggestion of it from the masterly settings which
John Bury has designed for them. That for Landscape
is naturalistic; it situates its two characters - a housekeeper
no longer young, and her robust and extrovert ex-cellarman husband
- precisely in a particular place: the kitchen of a great house.
But where the three characters in Silence find themselves is outside time and space: their chairs are
on a polished and reflecting floor, and their shadows are foe a
time thrown back on to the sloping surface of an engulfing sea.
Silence is universal; it is a comment, a verdict, rather, on the whole
of life; whilst Landscape
is about a particular marriage, a marriage that, because of an unsuspected
incident, is an exception to the condemnation implacably embodied,
though never stated in any words spoken, in Silence
David Waller and Peggy Ashscroft
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The age of the three characters in
Silence - a woman and
two men - varies from youth to the very end - and perhaps, when
the shadows cease, beyond the end - of life, as, in Peter Hall's
faultless production, they live again the chosen events of their
interconnected past. One of them, a farmer, is richer than the other
two; he might perhaps have married the woman when she was young,
but he did not. The second man is a farm-hand; he had tried to persuade
the girl to go away with him, and she had refused, neither of them
knowing of any reason for such a refusal that they could put into
words.
Neither man understands how he has missed happiness; the farmer,
as he contemplates his life, is puzzled, perplexed, protesting.
The farm-hand feels more strongly: he is angry and resentful at
what life has done to him, and he does not understand why. Of the
three it is the girl who had the greatest capacity for joy. In her
youth a radiance intermittently shines about her; and consequently
the inexplicable hostility of life wounds her even more grievously
than it does the other two. The almost querulous tones of Anthony
Bate, the blind rebellion of Norman Rodway, and the swift alterations
of Frances Cuka's hopes and despair make Pinter's beautiful and
arcane text very poignant.
But there are secret ways of escaping from the disillusionment of
everyday existence; and in Landscape Mr. Pinter shiningly shows us
one of them. Dame Peggy Ashcroft's Beth lives entirely in the transfiguring
memory of an encounter she had once had with an unnamed man by the
sea shore. Against the impregnable armour with this clothes her
the common chatter of her rough but not unkindly husband beats in
vain, and the confession of unfaithfulness on which he sets regretful
store is powerless to darken even by a shade or for a moment the
brilliant light of her remembered joy. His cheerful affection for
her, his desire, even at the end his surging and good-humoured lust
are wonderfully counter-pointed and rebuked into irrelevance by
her last devoted and ecstatic cry of 'Oh my true love' to a presence
not there but which nevertheless fills the house. It is possible
that Landscape (in which David Waller's Duff is in its way as fine as Dame
Peggy's Beth) will be the more popular of the two plays. But if
Mr Pinter were an unknown writer either of them would be sufficient
to establish his reputation as a dramatist of the highest, subtlest
class.
The Sunday Times, 6th July 69
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