Enigmatic characters and their effect on Pinter’s popularity

Pinter’s characters are much more “common” and “everyday” than, say, Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Ben and Gus are recognizable types. Indeed, their very ordinariness stands in often comic juxtaposition with their role as hit-men. They share stories from the newspaper, argue about football and have disputes about linguistic usage. Ben has his hobbies, and Gus notices the design of the crockery. And yet they are not fully rounded characters in the traditional sense. We are offered few clues about their past nor told exactly what they are doing in the present, indeed why they have been sent to this basement in Birmingham. Pinter has frequently pointed out that such omniscience by the dramatist is actually a fraud:

“the explicit form which is so often taken in twentieth century drama is

[. . .] cheating. The playwright assumes that we have a great deal of information about all his characters, who explain themselves to the audience” (qtd in Pugh).

Confronted by Pinter’s enigmatic characters, early audiences generally reacted with the kind of bewilderment with which Waiting for Godot had been met. Possibly the bafflement was even greater since Beckett’s play proclaims itself as an abstract avant-garde piece.

Pinter, on the other hand, presents recognizably realistic characters in recognizably realistic locations. Admittedly their linguistic exchanges, while using everyday language, may alienate because of the patently structured dialogue, but the conventional theater audience also expects to be given more information about Ben and Gus and their mission than Pinter is willing to reveal. Pinter prepared his defense in the program note for the 1960 premiere of The Dumb Waiter:

A character on stage who can present no convincing argument or information as to his past experience, his present behavior or his aspirations, nor give a comprehensive analysis of his motives is as legitimate and as worthy of attention as one who, alarmingly, can do all these things. The more acute the experience the less articulate the expression.

This may be true, but one may reasonably ask how acute the experience of Ben and Gus actually is. Gus may have been unsettled by the fact that their last victim was a woman, and they are both alarmed by the unreasonable demands of the messages sent down in the dumb waiter. But on a scale of intensity of emotion even Gus would not score very highly. Indeed, a large part of the interest of the piece lies in the very nonchalance of their approach to the disturbing requirement to kill a fellow human being and in the casual way in which they respond to the deaths reported in the newspaper.

It is at this point that I have some difficulty with the way in which Rees makes the concept of “trauma” central to her argument. It is true that, as Begley, quoted by Rees, says, “Physical cruelty is typically consigned to anticipation, memory, or offstage space” (164).

But to deduce from this that Pinter necessarily has problems with representing violence and may, therefore, be seen to be a forerunner of postmodernism seems to me a non-sequitur. Does this make Greek tragedy postmodernist? Pinter’s failure to depict violence does not proceed from difficulties of representation so much as from a deliberate decision to depict contract killers as ordinary men casually carrying out a job -- potentially more disturbing than demonizing them. Most of the guards at Auschwitz were not villains: they were just carrying out orders.

The two hit-men of The Dumb Waiter do not celebrate violence and hardly touch on past murders. The only actual killing referred to is their last job, the shooting of a girl:

She wasn’t much to look at, I know, but still. It was a mess though, wasn’t it? What a mess. Honest, I can’t remember a mess like that one. They don’t seem to hold together like men, women.

A looser texture, like. Didn’t she spread, eh? She didn’t half spread. Kaw! (130-31)

While this experience has clearly disturbed Gus and perhaps is the reason why he has begun to ask “so many damn questions” (127), the horror of this moment is touched on only briefly. Gus, relieved to learn that someone comes in to clean up after them, actually seems more distressed about the thought of sleeping in someone else’s sheets.

Similarly, the two reported deaths read from the newspapers are, in my experience, usually met with laughter in the theater rather than, as Rees suggests, “being indicative of an artistic impulse to add to levels of menace or intrigue.” On the contrary, the approach to death and killing is portrayed in The Dumb Waiter as playful rather than as the exploration of a trauma. Indeed, I would assert that the ending offers astonishment rather than shock -- and like most surprises is likely to be met by an audience with laughter rather than horror. It is only in his later, more overtly political plays, that Pinter communicates a sense of genuine trauma.

Denied clarity about motivation, denied also the visceral experience of intense emotion, The Dumb Waiter arguably presents us with a more real experience than that afforded by conventional Naturalism. The fourth wall is more genuinely removed, and we are confronted with two individuals who make no effort to explain themselves to the audience.

When the curtain goes up on one of my plays, you are faced with a situation, a particular situation, two people sitting in a room, which hasn’t happened before, and is just happening at this moment, and we know no more about them than I know about you. (Pinter qtd in Pugh)

One might assume that Pinter’s reluctance to persist in the

“cheating” of the “explicit” form might, by in fact offering a more real theatrical experience, help to cross the boundary to “low” culture. It is clear, however, that there was considerable early resistance to Pinter’s plays because audiences felt cheated of the information they felt necessary to understand the plot, thus making the dramas seem less

accessible than they might otherwise be. Pinter once received the following letter:

Dear Sir,

I would be obliged if you would kindly explain to me the meaning of your play The Birthday Party. These are the points which I do not understand: 1. Who are the two men? 2. Where did Stanley come from? 3. Were they all supposed to be normal? You will appreciate that without the answers to my questions I cannot fully understand your play.

Pinter allegedly replied with the following letter:

Dear Madam,

I would be obliged if you kindly explain to me the meaning of your letter. These are the points which I do not understand: 1.

Who are you? 2. Where do you come from? 3. Are you supposed to be normal? You will appreciate that without the answers to your questions I cannot fully understand your letter (qtd in Esslin 1973, 37-8).

It is a clever and funny response, and one that undoubtedly convinced the correspondent that Pinter was definitely not normal.

However, in the context of theater at the start of the second half of the twentieth century, Pinter’s reply is actually facetious and unhelpful.

Half a century further on, we may have little difficulty with the enigmatic characters and unresolved ending of The Dumb Waiter. At the time of writing, however, what was a more real theater experience than that offered by the mainstream fare of the West End appeared to the majority of the theatergoers as simply alienating.