In the visitors room, an elderly mother attempts to speak to her imprisoned son, but is prevented by the guard because the mountain language is forbidden.  In a second visit, the rules have been reversed; she is permitted to speak but cannot, at the sight of her bleeding, tortured son. The only language the sergeant understands is sexual, as understood by the nameless young woman who speaks for the group. The play was inspired by the Turkish treatment of the Kurds, but the outrages continue, as nightly television worldwide reports testify.
 

“Ashes to Ashes” (1996) is the longer work on the double bill and here the horrors of war are no less effective because they are described.  We are in a conventional living room with Rebecca (Anastasia Hille) and her husband Devlin (Neil Dudgeon), who is interrogating her about a former lover.  As her dream-like recollections take shape piecemeal, the affair she recounts seems to be as conventional as the setting, except for touches of brutality in lovemaking.

Then there is a shocking revelation, that this man “used to go to the local railway station and walk down the platform and tear all the babies from the arms of their screaming mothers.”  When we learn that he also commanded a factory of slave workers, fascist terror takes shape in a series of images .  Finally, Rebecca identifies with a mother fleeing the Nazis and giving up her baby.  Under the expert direction of Ms. Mitchell, the actors brilliantly interpret Pinter’s nuances, inflections, and silences that reveal as much about the characters as does the content of their speeches.  In an atmosphere of increasing tension, Ms. Hille changes from dreamy to assertive to guilt ridden, while Mr. Dudgeon reveals Devlin’s instability, pain, and finally, cruelty.

“One for the Road,” presented first in London and then at the Pinter Festival in New York, is a much darker play.  Lasting only 45 minutes, it concerns an interrogation by whiskey-drinking Nicholas (Harold Pinter), the brutal head of the secret police in an unnamed country, which could be anywhere.  “The voice of God speaks through me,” proclaims the ruthless Nicholas, determined “to keep the world clean for God.”  He betrays little emotion as he interviews his hapless victims who are tortured offstage: ironically-named Victor (Stephen Brennan), wife Gila (Brid Brennan), and child Nicky.   The horror, suggests Pinter, is ongoing, as indicated in the daily press. 

“Remembrance of Things Past” is a new play, based on Pinter’s 1972 unproduced screenplay of Marcel Proust’s epic 3500-page memoir.  Working with director Di Trevis, Pinter whittled his script to a three-hour realistic dream play in which Marcel  (Sebastian Harcombe) is narrator, observer, and player.  Marcel is both fleeing from the past and wishing to reconstruct it, with time intermittently suspended between past and present in a “freeze” frame.  Pinter observes in his introduction to the screenplay that the events move towards both disillusion and revelation “rising to where time that was lost is found and fixed forever in art.”

Like Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” (presented concurrently at the National),  “Remembrance”is a revelation of the social scene of the author’s times, with acute observation of the flaws and follies of a decaying aristocracy and rising middle class. Some of the minute details are preserved – like the ringing of the garden gate bell – as well as many of the memorable characters and situations.  The Duchess of Guermantes is too busy to sympathize with Swann, who is dying, but has time to change her footwear when the horrified Duke notices that she is wearing black shoes with a red dress.  The sexually ambivalent Albertine and her relationship with Andree, which Marcel probes after Albertine’s death, is reminiscent of Pinter’s “Old Times.”  Proust’s themes of time and of reality versus illusion are also Pinter’s, which may help to explain why Pinter’s version of “Remembrance of Things Past” is so successful on stage.

As is true of works by his friend Samuel Beckett, also poorly received at first,  Pinter's plays are marked by spare dialogue, silences, and a sense of menace lurking  just beyond.  And like Beckett, Pinter refuses to discuss the meaning of his plays.  When John Wood was directing the initial production of "The Birthday Party," Pinter did explain how he began to write the play:  He saw the image of a kitchen and characters in it, he said.  "They sounded in my ears. . . My task was not to damage their consistency." "Meaning begins in the words, the actions, and continues in your head and ends nowhere.  There is no end to meaning,." he wrote Wood on 30 March 1958.  "Meaning which is resolved, parceled, labeled and ready for export is dead, impertinent and meaningless," Pinter observed. Asked by Wood to give the actor of Stanley (the lodger whose birthday is celebrated) an indication of who he was, Pinter refused: "Stanley cannot perceive what he is -- he knows only to attempt to justify himself by dream, by pretense, and by bluff, through fright."

The most recent revival of "The Birthday Party" in London, with Prunella Scales as Meg and her husband Timothy West as Goldberg, was the best production I have seen of this oft-produced work. At a run-down seaside bed-and-breakfast house owned by a couple, Meg and Petey, arrive two men, Goldberg and McCann, respectively the brain and the brawn, who ask for Stanley, the only boarder.  Meg is planning a birthday party for Stan, for whom she has a maternal (and probably sexual) fondness.  At the party, the lights go out, guest Lulu is seduced by Goldberg, and Stanley is menaced.  The following day a roughed-up and inarticulate Stanley is hustled away by the two men. As Meg, Ms. Scales combined the character's dim-wittedness  and unconscious humor ("nice" is her one adjective) with yearning and insecurity (she fears  being carried off in a wheelbarrow), together with a wistful concern for Stanley whom she persists in misrepresenting  As Goldberg, Mr. West maintained the menace of the character, whether blustering on his arrival, vicious at the party and the morning after, yet  wavering and self-pitying in between.

"Moonlight," which premiered at the Almeida Theater in London in1994, is a family play like "The Homecoming" and "The Caretaker."  Here Ian Holm brilliantly portrayed a dying former civil servant, being visited by a friendly couple whom he dislikes, and speaking on the phone to his n'er do well sons, possibly gangsters, who refuse to visit him. Displaying Pinter’s unique blend of humor and menace, the sons pretend to be Chinese launderers when their father phones. His wife, Anna Calder-Marshall, attends him at his bedside, quietly knitting during his tirades. In a flashback to earlier times, their daughter is seen in banter with her brothers, but at the present, she may be dead.  Confined to an upstairs room, she recounts her trip in the moonlight, which seems to represent death.  Pinter later revised the work to depict her at the opening, silently wandering through the rooms where the action takes place.