HAROLD PAUSES, ANTONIA IS SILENT

A.A. Gill studies a Pinteresque husband and wife in the Ivy, and Mr Pinter's new play on the printed page ON FIRST nights, the Ivy — that com- munal greenroom for the boulevard arts —always has a particular atmosphere. Last Wednesday, there was a definite frisson, a froideur. The room was minding its p's and q's, sotto voce. As I sat down, I saw why. There, two tables away in a corner, was Harold Pinter — a theatrical lion at the watering-hole. Pinter is not one of those one-encore Wizard of Oz lions; not a 'you-were-wonderful-dar- ling-sing-us-a-medley-of-your-hit-sensa- tions'. Pinter is the real thing — a dramatic classic — and he comes with his own unique atmosphere, like cerebral aftershave. He had also come with Lady Antonia.

As the waiter approached bearing cham- pagne, I thought how uncomfortable it must be to serve Harold Pinter — the bloke who wrote The Dumb Waiter. You can imagine the dialogue:

`Are you ready?'

'Ready? Am I ready?' 'Ready to order. Are you ready to order?' [pause] 'Lamb.'

'You want lamb? You're ordering lamb?'

'Ordering? Am I ordering? I don't think lamb is an order.'

'So, you're not ordering lamb? Lamb isn't your order?' 'Yes, I think we're ready now, [pause] as ready as one can be.' 'To order, you're ready to order?' 'Not lamb. I never f—ing ordered lamb.'

When Pinter is in the room everything suddenly sounds unnervingly Pinteresque. All conversations become surreal, poignant, out of kilter.

'Your cab's here.'

'My cab, here?'

'Your cab, sir, it's outside.'

'Outside, here?'

And this must be the true measure of Pinter's greatness: he has given a name — his name — to the small exchanges of life; the loose exchange that drops unconsidered into conversation. He has taken the misheard, the ragged, the crip- pled edges of talk, the bits that fall down the back of the sofa, and given them gravitas. He has remoulded the timid question and repeated it as. a statement of great, echoing profundity. People who have never seen a line of Pinter know what a Pinter moment is. Nobody talks of a Lloyd-Webber moment.

Pinter has made the hole in the mint of dialogue all his own. But the odd thing is, if you say, 'That was very Harold Pinter', the company will laugh. Out in the streets, the pubs and the dining-rooms Harold Pinter is a great, droll humorist. This is the man who never wrote a come- dy, who has not even written an inten- tionally funny line. Now if you said, 'Oh my, that was a very Ray Cooney moment', nobody would laugh. Pinter's oeuvre has laid a funny egg.

A performance of The Caretaker at the Edinburgh Festival was advertised as being Tinteresque'. That's immortal, that's deathless, that is, when your own plays are like the sort of thing you write: that's Pinteresefue squared.

I have in front of me the Faber & Faber edition of the new Pinter play, Ashes to Ashes. It's 85 pages long. It ought to be 421/2 pages long, but only the right-hand folio is printed. Of course, maybe it is 85 pages and they've just for- gotten to print the left-hand bit and I'm reading every other page without notic- ing — which would also be very Pin- teresque but halved.

Anyway, the play doesn't make sense. That's not to say it's nonsense; it just has none of those tell-tale little nudges and winks that propel you through conversa- tions — there is a distinct dearth of sequiturs. Not only are the two charac- ters painfully opaque, but you get the feeling that they're not altogether hon- est. You see, even if they're telling the truth, it's like reconstructing a string of broken pearls. If they're lying, you've got to rub every line against your teeth. I tried saying the lines out loud, but I couldn't make them sound right. I thought maybe it needed another voice, a new voice outside my head. So I took it to my newsagent and asked him to do it with me: `You be Devlin, I'll be Rebecca.'

`I'm Mr Patel. Who is this Devlin?'

'It doesn't matter. Just read his lines.'

`You want me to be Devlin?'

`Yes. Read Devlin.'

`Who am I?'

`You're Mr Patel.'

`No. Who am I when I'm Devlin?'

`You don't need to know.'

'I need to know who I am.'

'I don't know who you are, that's why I want you to read.'

'If you don't know, why do you want me to be him? I could be anyone. I could be Mr Patel.'

`Just read, OK?'

`OK.'

Devlin: 'Do you feel you're being hypno- tised?'

Rebecca: 'When?'

D: 'Now.'

R: ' D: 'Really?'

R: 'No.'

D: 'Why not?'

R: 'Who by?'

D: 'By me.'

R: 'You?'

D: 'What do you think?'

R: 'I think you're a f— pig.'

`You can't say, "F— pig" to me.'

'I wasn't.'

'You just did.'

'No, Rebecca said it to Devlin.'

'Who is this Rebecca?'

'I don't know.'

'I don't want her in my shop.'

'This is rather Pinteresque.'

'Oh, Pinteresque. Yes. Ha, ha.'

The thing is, although dialogue can be Pinteresque, people can't. Characters aren't ever Pinterish. There isn't a recog- nisable Harold type. In fact, the revela- tion this week that the mistress in his play Betrayal was in real life Joan Bakewell has rather spoilt the essential weird enigma. It's too prosaic, too Sunday evening, like finding out that Hedda Gabler was really Valerie Singleton or Antigone was Paula Yates.

Ashes to Ashes has only two stage direc- tions and they're used liberally. One is 'pause', the other is 'silence'. Now, I think here may well be the key to Pinter. When does a pause become a silence? Is it, per- haps, in that profound margin between silence and pause that the essential mas- tery of Pinter exists? Every time I looked over at Harold and Lady Antonia (and we all looked a lot), I noticed that he was eloquent with his pauses and she replied effusively with silences. It was the com- forting banter of the long-term married intellectual. As we left, I overheard a snippet of dialogue. A young man nudged his girlfriend and pointed.

'Look. That's him, the playwright.' `Who?'

`You know — what's his name?'

'Oh. Harold Pooter.'

It was a Pinteresque moment.