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| Other Places - Premiere | ||||
First produced at TheNational Theatre, Cottesloe,
October 1982 Victoria Station A Kind of Alaska Directed by Peter Hall
The Withering of Love
The young man on whose (unuttered?) thoughts or (unwritten?) letters addressed to his mother we eavesdrop throughout Family Voices has chosen his other place. It is a substitute home, with all the glamour that burgeoning fantasy can confer: the social glamour of the scarlet Lady Withers and her icily familiar patronage, the sexual glamour of Jane, and the mother-comforts of the boozily grieving Mrs Withers, her romantic past and penchant for a cuddle. Throughout the bulletins, the abandoned mother of 'real life' moves from desolation to piqued possessiveness in her replies, and her son's old dependency steadily reasserts itself; not, if it is clear, out of sympathy for her plight, but out of growing unease with his own set-up. The young man may be getting his Withers wrong; or so the shift of real tension and inventiveness, away from this comedy of ambivalence in his dealings with the ladies, onto his encounters with the even more alarming menfolk, would imply. 'I could crush a slip of a lad like you to death, the death I understand love to be', says one, a 'big man', a 'policeman by trade' called upon to exert breathtaking self-discipline in the interests of staying on the right side of God; 'This is a place of creatures up and down stairsÖa catapulting ordure of gross and ramshackle shenanigans, openended paraphernalia. Follow me?' opines the other, older occupant. In the face of such grotesque passion and conviction the young man's jauntily-affected knowingness melts away: he will return to the fold, the venomous ministrations of his mother, the vengeful shade of his father who died 'in lamentation and in oath' and whose voice speaks the most chilling words of the piece: 'What I have to say to you will never be said'. This small comic-horror masterpiece, first seen and heard last year, is expertly revived with Nigel Havers taking the part then played by the suavely thuggish Michael Kitchen: Havers seems less capable of having made it all up, but is no less compelling for that.
In Victoria Station a mini-cab driver languishing by the side of 'a dark park' in Crystal Palace, and his increasingly demented controller wrestling over the air-waves with the former's stunned incomprehension and his own raging loneliness, sketch the outlines of a mutual dependency so desperate and so charged with misunderstanding that the controller's promise to 'come down there' sounds like a death-threat and the driver's plaintive 'Don't leave me' gasped into his car-radio sounds like the cry of a helpless child. The one in his darkened office, the other in his darkened cab, exchange the counters of their trade less and less convincingly, and both eventually give way to escapist fantasy. Fear and loathing in South London take on a music-hall air as the possibility of getting a cab to Victoria Station recedes and a double-act of intermittent and fading interest takes over; will control 'go down there' or get the driver back for a nice cup of tea? Has the latter a Passenger On Board, a sleeping girl with whom he had fallen in love, as he says he has, and will he stay in Crystal Palace for ever? Has he perhaps killed the girl? Or assaulted her? Are these things even on his mind? The sketch remains a sketch, a brilliantly economical and quintessentially Pinterish idea that never begins to look like a play; glowingly isolated faces marooned behind glass and the crackle of the intercom have, initially a diffused irony and pathos, but the opportunities are wasted.
Victoria Station is not very far from Crystal
Palace by car; whereas Alaska connotes in anybodyís language
a region of unimaginable remoteness and chill. This, a doctor tells
his patient, is where her mind has been, for twenty-nine years;
she has fallen victim to encephalitis and has woken to a world changed
beyond recognition. The idea for A Kind of Alaska came, we
are told, from Pinterís reading of Oliver Sacksís unforgettable
Awakenings, and as a donnee it is almost unbearably
affecting; the gradual breaking of the ice occupies the duration
of the play, and Pinterís achievement is to have translated this
idea into a wry and unsentimental portrayal of anger, bewilderment
and plucky intelligence facing out a single appalling fact. He is
aided by the stunning performance of Judi Dench as Deborah, the
patient; to a great extent a one-woman show, the piece still allows
Paul Rogers and Anna Massey as the doctor and Deborahís sister,
also his wife to come into their own. Yet again, it is a drama of
dependency ñ of a uniquely demanding and terrifying kind - and yet
again it is the weave of family life that is evoked by Deborahís
petulant or sharply ironic fragmented memories. A new family has
established itself around her in the place of the old (mother dead,
father gone blind): the sister who has stayed by her has married
the doctor but is 'widowed' by his devotion to the 'sleeping' girl;
as Deborah learns her circumstances and attempts by short, stabbing
asides to get 'the matter in proportion' (an unthinkable task) we
come to recognise the depth and intensity of their dependence
on her. Accounts of the onset of her sickness, her own recall of
the 'other place', between life and death, to which she has been
condemned, and her first steps outside a hospital bed, are riveting;
even more so are the slowly surfacing suggestion that she may in
some obscure way have willed her withdrawal, and the moment when
it looks like she is about to retreat into it. The mystery of that
withdrawal, and what the girl makes and fails to make of her translation
by L-Dopa back into consciousness, are stated or implied with a
marvellous sureness of touch; though necessarily cutting corners
that were fully explored in Awakenings Pinter is nowhere
in danger of travestying the humane vision behind his source. His
own eye may be 'clinical' in a sense Sacks would not approve, and
his ear is for the gestures of stoical defence and self-preservation
grimly familiar from his other plays; yet the compassion and humour
of this piece manage to suggest a coming in from the cold rather
than a complete surrender to it. |
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