The Birthday Party
HAROLD
PINTER
IS
THAT TRUE?
The recently awarded
with the Nobel Prize of Literature and lots of other more has been since he
wrote The Room in 1957 (1) a really important writer and also an important point
to worldwide society. He has always been really interested in politics and he
has defended social causes. This interest in common benefit and also his
tendency to the Left politics thinking may be caused by his life situation,
being always a really humble person. He started being linked to theatre when he
joined the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, becoming this way a professional
actor. Then he started to write after getting married with an actress, and
started to show everybody his particular vision of the world. Recently, during
his gratitude speech for the Nobel Prize, Pinter said some interesting words
that define in some way his vision of the world and also of the theatre: “There
are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between
what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or
false; it can be both true and false.”
(2). He continued saying that he still believes in this affirmation he
first said in 1958 but that nowadays can only be applied to the field of theatre because citizens may not feel
indiferent through a no clear truth or lie.
Those topics, truth
and lie, appear generally in every play of Pinter. In some of them, truth and
lie appear in the sense that you wonder if it is true or not what the author is
saying and on other ones in the sense that characters lie “clearly” and so you
see how this fact or the opposite one affects to the play. For example at the
end of The Lover we realised that all the play we have been reading can
be a lie. You can not know it sure but Pinter ends the story hinting at the
possibility that all has been a game between the marriage. ( Richard and
Sarah’s house. They are talking about the lover. He starts to say he is not
going to allow anymore the visits of him to his house. Then, Richard finds a
bongo and starts to talk). “R: Oh yes? S: What are you
doing? R: Is this what you are doing? This way? How fun it is!
Have you got a light? Have you got a
light? Come on! Don’t be killjoy. Your husband does not
mind if you give me a light. You look a
little bit pale. Why are you pale? Such a beautiful lady S: Don’t say
this, don’t say it! R: You are trapped. We are alone. I have locked the door. S: You shouldn’t to do this, don’t
do it, don’t do it! R: He would not matter. Nobody else know it.
Nobody can hear us. Nobody knows we are in here. Come on. Give us a light. You
can’t escape from here darling, you are
trapped. S: I am trapped.
What would he say? He waits me. He is waiting me. I can’t escape. I’m trapped.
You don’t have no the right to treat a married woman like this. Isn’t it true?Think, think, think in what
you are doing. This is really
bold. It is really. But my husband will understand it. My husband understands
it. Come here. Come down here. I will explain it to you. [...] It is time for
whispering, isn’t it? [...] I had never seen you after a sunsetting. My husband
will be on a meeting until late night. Yes, you look different. Why are you
wearing this so strange suit and this tie?You use to wear something different,
don’t you?[...] Do you want me to change my clothes? [...] R:
Yes. Change. Change your clothes. Charming
prostitute ” (3)*.
This fact can also be seen in The
Collection. All characters try not to be discovered and not to face the
reality in front of someone who can made them being ashamed of their behaviour,
an infidelity. We can see this for example when James is relieved being said
that nothing really happened, but when he goes home and asks his wife about it
she does not answer.
“ You didn’t do anything, did you? He wasn’t in your room. You just talked about
it, in the lounge. That’s the truth, isn’t it?
You just sat and talked about what you would do if you went to your room.
That’s what you did. Didn’t you? That’s the truth… isn’t it?” (4) This example
shows again how Pinter gives a little brushstroke in most of his plays
referring to lies and truth.
Refering to The
Birthday Party , we do not see as clear as in the other one plays the point
of the truth and the lie. This time we need to deduce it in some situations.
One can go through the play and will never find out the truth or falsedom about
what either Stanley and the two strangers say. Maybe they really found the
wrong man, but maybe not. As an example,
before they get there, Stanley feels already frightened and anxious to
know exactly who is going to stay in the house and it seems he is always hiding
something. This way you can not clearly know why is happening everything.
Pinter’s plays can be
remarkable because of the brevity of the written content, but not because of
this, also in literary content. This means that plays are short but there is
not noticed a lack of text in most of them. That is Pinter tradition: silences,
a non possibility to emplace plays on a time or a concrete space generally, and
also ambiguity between truth and lie.
(1) http://www.haroldpinter.org/
(2) http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html
(3) L’Amant,
Harold Pinter.(46-49, Richard and Sarah dialogue). Translation by Jordi Malé i
Pegueroles, 1995, Ed. 62, 46-49.
(4). The Collection,
Harold Pinter. (157, James dialogue). Photocopied
source, (Servei de reprografia de la Facultat de Filologia)
(*) This quotation has been
translated by me from Catala into English again because it was impossible for
me to retrieve the original version and make a good quotation.
http://www.elpais.es/articulo/20051013elpepucul_1/Tes/elpporcul/
http://www.analitica.com/va/entretenimiento/quepasa/7721500.asp
http://www.avizora.com/publicaciones/biografias/textos/textos_p/0016_pinter_harold.htm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/pinter/life.shtml
http://www.grec.net/cgibin/mlt00.pgm?USUARI=gencat1&SESSIO=0004976268
Academic year 2005/2006
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Aina García Coll
Universitat de València Press
aigari@alumni.uv.es