Harold Pinter

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Michael Billington on what TS Eliot's complex plays did for the theatre

Is there a dramatist currently less fashionable than TS Eliot? The verse-drama revival he so ardently championed bit the dust. His high Anglicanism is now a minority taste. Even the drawing-room settings he used as a spiritual battleground seem redolent of a lost world. The ultimate irony is that Eliot achieved the theatrical breakthrough he sought only with Cats: a musical that, at the last count, had been seen by over 50 million people worldwide; you could call it Old Possum's posthumous revenge. Next week, the Donmar Warehouse in London is bucking the trend with a two-month Eliot festival. It will include a revival of The Family Reunion, readings of Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party, and a performance of Four Quartets complemented by music from Beethoven. Time will tell whether this will be enough to restore Eliot's theatrical fortunes. I wouldn't bet on it: we live in an age of peculiar theatrical narcissism. We expect drama to conform to our own politically correct concerns; with a few shining exceptions, theatres now show a deep incuriosity about the past. Even Shaw has had to battle against decades of neglect. Eliot is a more complex case, and I would readily concede many of the arguments against him. His constant emphasis on contrition and self-denial becomes oppressive. Just as Eliot's religiousness can subside into misanthropy, so his politics can descend into snobbery. And, in attempting to pour both Greek myth and dramatic poetry into an acceptable West End form, he can be said to have sacrificed two babies with the bath water. Even he acknowledged, a propos The Cocktail Party, that "every step in simplification brings me nearer to Frederick Lonsdale", a creator of popular boulevard divertissements. Yet, for all that, I still believe Eliot deserves a second look. I am sorry that the Donmar season hasn't found room for Sweeney Agonistes, Eliot's most daring theatrical experiment. Billed as "fragments of an Aristophanic melodrama", it shows death intruding on a party hosted by two good-time girls. Written in a jazzy, freeform style that, shortly after Eliot's death, was given a brilliant accompanying score by John Dankworth, it anticipates many of the discoveries of postwar drama. In its use of repetition, its orchestration of demotic speech, and its mixture of comedy and menace, it clearly had an influence on Harold Pinter. Moreover, as Kenneth Tynan shrewdly noted, it articulates one of Eliot's key themes: an obsessive guilt often connected with the death of a woman. As Sweeney himself at one point cries: I knew a man once did a girl in. Any man might do a girl in Any man has to, needs to, wants to Once in a lifetime, do a girl in. Sweeney was never completed, but it provides a matrix for Eliot's imaginative development. It also suggests a second reason for looking closely at his stage work. Drama is inevitably a form of self-revelation, and Eliot's plays, in their constant emphasis on the need to expiate past sins, in their portrait of the hollowness of public men, and even in their final acceptance of human love, tell us a lot about the poet himself. All Eliot's heroes are, significantly, harried and haunted by their pasts. It's a rule that applies to Becket in Murder in the Cathedral, Harry in The Family Reunion, pursued by the Furies to his family's ancestral home, and to Lord Claverton in The Elder Statesman who, in his declining years, is confronted by his youthful disregard for human life. Eliot's plays provide an extraordinary self-portrait culminating, towards the end of his life, in an achieved absolution. People often pooh-pooh the biographical approach to art. Michael Hastings was derided for dredging up the story of Eliot's tormented first marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood in his play, Tom and Viv. But, while it is always dangerous to moralise about people's marriages, Hastings' play did some good in demolishing the myth of Eliot's impersonality. His marriage to Haigh-Wood led to emotional disorders on both sides, eventual separation and finally to her commitment to a psychiatric hospital. I'm not suggesting that this provides the clue to all Eliot's work; but it can hardly be an accident that his archetypal protagonist is a man who, whatever his public achievements, is wracked by a sense of guilt only relieved by self-abnegation. In Eliot's plays, sin and suffering are often accompanied by a sprightly comic sense. Everyone harps on the fact that The Cocktail Party ends with the off-stage crucifixion of Celia Coplestone, who has become a Christian missionary, on an African village anthill: an act of willed martyrdom that many people find repugnant. What is ignored is that the play also satirises the small talk of prattling partygoers and reminiscences about unseen figures, in a way that Pinter brilliantly extended in the Hirst-Spooner second act in No Man's Land. I would argue that Eliot's gift for self-revelation and social comedy only fully emerges in his two totally ignored final plays: The Confidential Clerk (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1958). I would happily sacrifice yet another evening sitting in some chilly church listening to actors worthily intoning Murder in the Cathedral for the odd revival of these two forgotten plays. The Confidential Clerk is a rivetingly bizarre play about parents seeking children and children seeking parents. It is also filled with countless echoes: of Euripides's Ion, Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Shaw's Misalliance, and Gilbert and Sullivan's HMS Pinafore. What gives the play extra-curricular fascination, however, is how much it tells us about Eliot. Ultimately this is about the compromises by which people live, and the shadow-like nature of our professional lives. When Sir Claude Mulhammer, a successful financier who yearns to become a potter, talks of "a consuming passion to do something for which one lacks the capacity", one wonders if Eliot is referring to his own desire to become a popular dramatist. But the play is also about the universal search for some transcendent experience: what Mulhammer calls "an agonising ecstasy that makes life bearable". Colby, his presumed son, finds it in religion; Sir Claude, in pottery. When Eliot wrote The Elder Statesman, he had exorcised many of his demons by marrying his second wife, Valerie. Accordingly, he creates a hero, Lord Claverton, who banishes the spectres from his past. Achieving reconciliation with his two children, the hero finally drops all pretences and announces: "I have been brushed by the wing of happiness." Appearing in the same year as A Taste of Honey, and Chicken Soup With Barley, The Elder Statesman looked old-fashioned and enjoyed the shortest West End run of any of Eliot's plays; yet it remains his most human and touching work. All of which begs the real question: is Eliot a dramatic dodo, or does his work still have relevance in a predominantly secular age that has all but eradicated notions of sin, guilt and contrition? I wouldn't bank on a sudden Eliot boom, but I have a hunch that his plays have the capacity to address our search for something beyond mundane materiality. Our goals may be radically different from Eliot's, but poor Tom's not quite cold yet.From Mamet to Monty Python: Two verse-dramatists on what Eliot taught themGlyn Maxwell Eliot gave a speech at Harvard in 1950, in which he reported his experiences in writing and staging his three major plays. He considers what worked, what didn't, and why. There was no sign of the authoritative poet-critic. He was humble, candid, even drily comic.The speech was helpful, and meant to be - it was explicitly addressed to poets who might wish to write plays. Nearly all his concerns were formal: above all, to avoid the "Shakespearean echo" which sank the Romantics as playwrights. He started with what he called the "versification of Everyman" when writing Murder in the Cathedral, then switched to a long flexible line with a wandering caesura for all the others. The principle seemed to be: anything but pentameter. This was fair enough, given the Victorian artefact from which Eliot's poetry dissented - though the five-beat line emerged fit and well in the hands of his contemporary Edward Thomas: it's a more provisional, uncertain line, one that's nearer breath than poetry. I also think Eliot's Sweeney fragments stumbled on a more suggestive and durable form than did The Cocktail Party, and echo down, consciously or not, in everything from Pinter to Mamet to Monty Python.Peter OswaldVerse plays are not eligible for the TS Eliot prize, or any other poetry prize. Yet Eliot believed that poetry and drama were integral to each other: poetry dries up if it forgets its roots in sacred drama; drama becomes a slow-footed follower of the newspapers if it discards poetry. Just as he set out to tie up the cut ends of our culture in The Wasteland, so Eliot threw himself into reuniting poetry and drama. It was daunting. As he put it: "This verse drama is hard. You have to give your life to it." He felt he'd come to it too late.When I started writing verse drama, I felt that Eliot's dramatic enterprise was a heroic failure. What made things difficult was his disinclination for the obvious form - the iambic pentameter. To a modernist this option was locked shut, Pound having said that "the first step was to break the pentameter". But the blank verse form treads such a fine line between formal verse and ordinary speech: in my experience, it is salvation for the poet/playwright. Eliot did start something. Ted Hughes strove with the verse play all his life, culminating in his glorious Alcestis. This year saw the revival of the Canterbury festival, for which Murder in the Cathedral was commissioned; a play by Sebastian Barry was staged in the cathedral. Who knows, Eliot's fusion of poetry and drama may be realised in our lifetime.Glyn Maxwell's play Liberty recently completed a national tour. Peter Oswald's version of Schiller's Mary Stuart opens on Broadway next spring. His play Lisbon opens in the West End at the same time.The TS Eliot festival starts tomorrow and runs till January 17. Details: donmarwarehouse.comTS EliotTheatreguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Michael Billington on directing Harold Pinter's works

For the past four weeks I've been leading a strange double life, like a John le Carré character. By day I've been closeted with a group of third-year acting students from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (Lamda) in a west London rehearsal room, directing a Pinter triple bill. By night I've been dashing off to review other people's work in the usual glut of autumn openings. I may have lost a good deal of sleep, and weight, in the process, but it has been a peculiarly exhilarating experience that has taught me a lot about Pinter, the role of the director and even, possibly, myself. Why do it? I guess, in part, it springs from a Hamlet-like irresolution that has dogged much of my life. At Oxford in the late 1950s, I was torn between reviewing and directing. If I finally chose the former, it was because I felt more confident sitting behind a typewriter evaluating plays and performances than walking into a rehearsal room. But I've never quite been able to kick the directorial habit. Working at Lincoln Rep in the early 1960s, I directed a handful of plays. In 1987, I did a production of Marivaux's The Will in the Barbican conservatory with a lively group of RSC actors. In 1997, I tackled Pinter's The Lover and Strindberg's The Stronger in a season of plays staged by critics at BAC. Now, partly through a chance remark to a friend studying at Lamda, I find myself back in a rehearsal room and confronting the nervous tension of a first night. Colleagues have variously described me as mad, foolhardy or brave to step out of the critical comfort zone. But I don't quite see it like that. It seems to me absurd that people driven by a hunger for theatre should be confined to little boxes from which they can never escape. The roles of the director and critic overlap. In both cases, the prime task is to discern an author's intention and to interpret it as clearly as possible. The big difference is that the critic does it with words, whereas the director engages in a collaborative process with actors, designers, and lighting and sound experts. What we are all trying to do is get to the root of the text. My own urge to direct springs, I swear, not from any arrogant belief that I can challenge the masters of the art - more from a fascination with the theatrical process. In inviting me to direct Pinter, Lamda clearly assumed that, as his biographer, I would be able to bring some specialist knowledge to the table. Whether that is true or not isn't for me to say. What amazes me is just how much I've learned about Pinter from directing his work, rather than simply analysing it in print. I decided to up the ante by not just presenting two of Pinter's late, lesser-known plays, Party Time (1991) and Celebration (2000), but also including a rehearsed reading of his 2005 Nobel lecture, Art, Truth and Politics, in which he examined the origins of his own plays, offered a devastating attack on the destructiveness of US foreign policy and asked for Tony Blair to be arraigned before the international criminal court of justice. Adding the latter to the programme was a calculated risk; it looks like paying off. Linking Party Time and Celebration was convenient. Both have a cast of five men and four women, which means they can be easily cross-cast. But until I started working on them, I hadn't appreciated their similarities. Both take place in hermetically affluent milieux: the former at a suave party, the latter in a posh nosh-house. Both remind us that bourgeois comfort often blinds us to the erosion of civil liberties. Both also contain a character - a state prisoner in the first play, an intrusive waiter in the second - who stands outside the frame of the action and eventually has the last word. Party Time is darkish in tone, whereas Celebration is violently funny. When played together, they demonstrate Pinter's awareness of our cocooned indifference to global cruelty. With Pinter, however, it's always the language that takes you by surprise. Many have noted his ability to orchestrate demotic speech, to find an eerie poetry in the most banal exchanges and make dramatic use of pauses and silences. But only when you work on them in detail do you realise that his undervalued, later plays show his verbal economy at its most refined. I would heretically suggest that you could cut a few lines out of The Caretaker and the play would still work. But with Party Time and Celebration, there is not one single phrase that is redundant or fails to enhance the musical structure. Take the following exchange between a couple of married diners in Celebration: Russell: You're a prick. Suki: Not quite. Russell: You're a prick. Suki: Good gracious. Am I really? Russell: Yes. That's what you are really. Suki: Am I really? Russell: Yes. That's what you are really. As a critic, one might easily pass over such an exchange. As a director, working with inquisitive actors, you notice the rhythmic power and loaded nature of the dialogue. Suki has just undermined Russell's masculinity. He retaliates by challenging her femininity. And a harmless-looking word such as "really" acquires incremental force as it turns from adverbial enquiry into emphatic statement and weapon of domestic destruction. Which is why my emphasis, in directing Pinter, has been on exploring text rather than the characters' imagined back-story. But possibly the greatest surprise has lain in unearthing the dramatic potential of Pinter's Nobel lecture. I've been blessed with an exceptional cast of young, inquiring and talented actors. However, I sensed, at our first meeting, a hint of scepticism about the idea of staging the lecture. I hope I'm not naive in believing that any such doubts have long since vanished. We were all encouraged by a trip to the Guardian office, where security editor Richard Norton-Taylor gave us a comprehensive guide to global politics and talked about the importance of documentary theatre. One of our cast talked about being caught up in the Nepalese riots and being astonished to find how little the events had been reported in Britain. I'm not claiming we have all become walking political oracles. But the mere fact of rehearsing the Pinter lecture forces one to engage with world events. It also reminds one of the continuing truth of Pinter's central argument: that the media is often culpably myopic in reporting American interventionism. Even as we've been rehearsing, reports of US-inspired threats to democracy in Bolivia, Venezuela and Paraguay have been emerging more through newspapers' letters pages than on-the-ground reporting. As Pinter says in his lecture, about the global body count attributable to American foreign policy: "It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn't happening." Still sadly true. The greatest pleasure in directing the Pinter project has come from working with other people. Criticism may involve going to the theatre every night but, in essence, it is a solitary activity: in the end, you're alone with your thoughts and the laptop. Going into a rehearsal room every morning demands engagement with a group. If I have learned anything about myself from the Lamda experience, it is that, while I may not be God's gift to directing, it's vital to escape occasionally from the confines of the critical ego and engage in a collaborative venture. No doubt all critics would be better at their jobs if they did this sort of thing more often. Now the rehearsals are almost done, and the production awaits its first performance tonight. For me, it's a mildly anxious time, but I, luckily, have a night job to go back to. For the actors, it's far more nerve-racking, since this is their first public exposure to the agents, casting directors and industry figures who will determine their future. I am confident they will pass the test with flying colours. And, whatever my own inadequacies as a director, I hope I have passed on to them one big thing: that playing Pinter requires a relentless focus on the minutiae of language, which, once learned, is never lost, and which provides an invaluable professional tool, whether you are playing Chekhov or Casualty.Harold PinterTheatreguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds