intro to drama article

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The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

After Beckett: The Plays of Pinter, Stoppard, and ShepardHarold Pinter: You Never Heard Such Silence by Alan Bold; Tom Stoppard: An Assessmentby Tim Brassell; Inner Landscapes: The Theater of Sam Shepard by Ron MottramReview by: Michael Hinden

Contemporary Literature, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 400-408Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208353 .Accessed: 15/03/2013 23:15

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AFTER BECKETT:THE PLAYS OF PINTER, STOPPARD, AND SHEPARD*

Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, and Sam Shepard are among the leadingdramatists writing for the English-speaking stage. Each has amasseda significant body of work, each is at, or just one side of, mid-career,and each enjoys sustained attention from the theater-going public, aswell as from reviewers and academic critics. The stress and concernsof criticism, however, differ for each. Pinter criticism, firmly estab-lished, has arrived at a moderately revisionist stage. Stoppard (sevenyears younger than Pinter) still is being explained, and Shepard (theyoungest of the three) has not quite been assimilated; the first full-length study of his work has just appeared. These three volumes byAlan Bold, Tim Brassell, and Ron Mottram, then, provide an occa-sion to gauge some of the currents in British and American dramaof the eighties and to reflect upon the criticial reception of three ofour liveliest and most challenging playwrights.

We should be cautious in comparing them; each playwright hasevolved a quirky dramatic vision. No one would confuse their dis-tinctive theatrical habitats- Shepard's pop-art American farmhouses,Pinter's claustrophobic London rooms, Stoppard's iterary garage sale,world-class. Yet behind each looms the nimble, brooding presence ofBeckett, the progenitor of postmodern theater. All fully acknowledgetheir indebtedness to Beckett, having absorbed from him a variety of

*Alan Bold, ed., Harold Pinter: You Never Heard Such Silence. Totowa, N.J.:Vision Press and Barnes and

Noble,1985. 184

pp.$27.50.

Tim Brassell, Tom Stoppard: An Assessment. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985.299 pp. $19.95.

Ron Mottram, Inner Landscapes: The Theater of Sam Shepard. Columbus, Mo.:Univ. of Missouri Press, 1984. 172 pp. $7.95.

Contemporary Literature XXVII, 3 0010-7484/86/0003-0400 $1.50/0?1986 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System








dramatic techniques. Among these are a new concept of plot (cyclicalrather than progressive action), of dialogue (a manic loquacity punc-tuated by silences or metaphysical jokes), and of character (benumbed,interchangeable pairs, trios, or mismatched family members whoseidentities shift in disturbing ways as they grapple with vague butpowerful threats). In the theater of Pinter, Stoppard, and Shepard,language sometimes is divorced from its most proximate referent,passion frets, time drags (or else loops back upon itself), fantasies sup-plant normal consciousness, and memory usually fails. If the past isundecidable, then the future is unthinkable. Yet their charactersstubbornly endure. Most of them are still on their feet at the finalcurtain, having weathered humiliation, violent assaults, or exposure.

Stoppard's machine-oiled expositors manage to get in a last bon mot,Shepard's wild men zonk themselves into myth, and Pinter's acerbiccouples, like Eliot's Prufrock, are given time yet for a hundred indeci-sions, / And for a hundred visions and revisions, / Before the takingof a toast and tea. Disorienting, yes, but the contemporary dramaticvoice, like Beckett's, can be darkly comic.

In the most recent work of these three playwrights, Beckett's nflu-ence has waned, and we can detect shifts in patterns and directionsfrom

playsthat were written

onlya few

years ago. Pinter,for

example,now seems willing to forego the obsession with verification that typi-fied the body of his work until the mid-seventies. In such plays as TheBirthday Party, The Room, The Caretaker, The Collection, The Home-coming, and Old Times, audiences never could discover with any assur-ance who did what to whom, and why. But in Betrayal (1978), Pinterchances filling in the blanks. He supplies a definite past for hisadulterous protagonists, and this frees him to explore motivation andhuman feeling in greater detail than in any of his earlier plays. Byhis use of a regressive plot, Pinter here makes the past itself, and itsineluctable link with the present, his main concern. Furthermore, inBetrayal he gives rein to an unexpected romanticism, as when Jerry,speaking to Robert of Emma, blurts out: And how wonderful foryou that this is so, that this is the case, that her beauty is the case. 'The undertones call up not only Pinter's familiar spirit, Wittgenstein,2but also - and this most surprisingly Keats, with his Beauty-is-Truth

'Harold Pinter, Betrayal (New York: Grove Press, 1978), Scene Nine, p. 138.2The first proposition in the Tractatus s: The world is all that is the case. LudwigWittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F.McGuinness (New Jersey: The Humanities Press, 1974), p. 5. Pinter's debt to Wittgen-stein is generally acknowledged.

AFTER BECKETT 401








coda to Ode on a Grecian Urn. Nowhere else in Pinter do we findsuch naked, lyrical speeches as those spoken by Jerry:

I adore you. I'm madly in love with you. I can't believe that what anyoneis at this moment saying has ever happened has ever happened. Nothing hasever happened. Nothing. This is the only thing that has ever happened. Youreyes kill me. I'm lost. You're wonderful.3

There are no pauses or evasions here; Pinter is writing in a riskier,more open style than previously he allowed himself. In A Kind ofAlaska (1982), the language is cooled down and more elliptical, butagain we are given all the background information that we need inorder to explore the play's naturalistic premise: the awakening of awoman from a coma lasting twenty-nine years and her struggle to cometo grips with her lost girlhood. Although the character has difficultyseparating past from present, we in the audience do not.

These plays suggest that Pinter has moved some distance beyondBeckett in his recent approach to character and situation. At the sametime, his links with forerunners in the modern tradition are becomingmore apparent. That is why Alan Bold's collection, Harold Pinter:You Never Heard Such Silence, is particularly welcome now. These

thoughtful, well-constructed essays invite us to consider Pinter's workin the context of modern literature as a whole. In Harold Pinter -Innovator? Randall Stevenson traces Pinter's connections with earlymodernism, going back well beyond Beckett to Hemingway, Joyce,and Kafka: Hemingway's creation of a dialogue idiom in which char-acters struggle over subjects indirectly defined by their very avoidanceof them, directly anticipates the sort of complexities in language andconversation which appear so extensively in Pinter's drama (p. 32).Peter Hall

( Directing Pinter )discloses that his

approachin direct-

ing a Pinter play is first of all to expose the underlying melodramaof the text (p. 20). Stanley Eveling, in Pinter's Stagecraft: MeetingPeople is Wrong, argues that Pinter's most successful ploy is toadvance characters from the sub-plot to positions of dramatic powerin the plays while leaving them without the main plot which givesthem their dramatic role and place (p. 83). That is why, accordingto Eveling, the plays exist in a sort of untragic limbo (p. 88). Thisinsight, by the way, seems relevant to Stoppard's work, as well, par-ticularly Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

The prerogative of most of the commentators in Bold's collectionis to suggest that earlier critics have exaggerated Pinter's breach with

3Betrayal, Scene Nine, pp. 136-37.

402 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE








past dramatic practice. Thus, Charles Carpenter sees him almostas a symbolist ( 'What Have I Seen, the Scum or the Essence?': Sym-bolic Fallout in Pinter's The Birthday Party ); Ronald Knowlesdescribes him as an existentialist ( Names and Naming in the Playsof Harold Pinter ); Katherine H. Burkman finds traditional ritual ele-ments in the work ( Death and the Double in Three Plays by HaroldPinter ); Steven H. Gale sees the plays as illuminating familial roles( Harold Pinter's Family Voices and the Concept of the Family ); andBernard Dukore treats A Kind of Alaska as an extension of, ratherthan a departure from, Pinter's earlier work ( Alaskan Perspectives ).The strength of these essays by able, mature critics derives in part fromthe accumulated body of opinion now available to those writing on

Pinter's plays. One can appreciate the spadework on Pinter that wasdone in the sixties and seventies; now the first plantings have matured,and the critical subsoil seems well suited to a second growth. HaroldPinter: You Never Heard Such Silence is an excellent collection. Theessays draw on past reserves, are mutually illuminating, and help extendour appreciation of Pinter's importance to the modern theater.

By contrast, scholars in the Stoppard camp seem only peripherallyaware of one another's work. To be fair, most of the books on Stoppardhave

appearedin

rapid successionin the

last few years, andin

suchcircumstances, duplication and overlap are bound to occur. Such isthe case with Tim Brassell's Tom Stoppard: An Assessment, which,according to its book jacket, purports to be the first major study towork systematically through his plays. In fact, the book delivers itsnews a little late, trailing- in some instances only by a nose-eightother full-length studies and scores of well-focused articles. Inevitably,some of Brassell's claims appear familiar, e.g., that Rosencrantz andGuildenstern Are Dead is no mere Shakespearean burlesque, or that

Jumpers is more than a witty farce (p. 116). These points have beenwell established by others. The value of Brassell's book lies in the equalattention it gives to Stoppard's lesser known achievements, includinghis plays for radio and television. There are good discussions here ofAlbert's Bridge, The Real Inspector Hound, Every Good Boy DeservesFavor, Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, and On the Razzle. Brassellknows the theater well and offers shrewd critical judgments, often bymeans of apt comparisons to the work of other dramatists. However,his discussion of the major plays, in particular Jumpers and Travesties,disappoints.

Brassell treats the former as a dead-pan critique of logical posi-tivism, the latter as an earnest travesty of revolutionary schemes inpolitics and art, although he notes that both plays take place in a

AFTER BECKETT I 403








carnival atmosphere (p. 161). On reflection it seems that a more com-plex awareness of intertextual play is called for here. Brassell providesextensive historical footnoting on logical positivism, Leninism, Dada,and the facts behind the Joyce-Carr dispute, but he skirts the issueof Stoppard's atttude toward his materials, which can be describedneither as rhetorical nor merely parodic. In an interview, Stoppardonce alluded to his favorite Beckett joke, which (he said) consistsof confident statement followed by immediate refutation by the samevoice. It's a constant process of elaborate structure and sudden - andtotal - dismantlement. 4 In his own plays, Stoppard goes Beckett onebetter by insisting on certain truth-values even though they have beendismantled - or, to put it differently, because they have been dis-

mantled, he proposes to reassert them in good faith. Such is the casewith Joyce's magical-humanist artistic credo in Travesties, or George'sintuitive ethical stance in Jumpers. Like weighted punching dummies,these notions take a beating but just keep bobbing back. It is true thatStoppard's irrepressible recourse to pastiche, his irreverence and play-fulness, serve reverent and moral ends. But it would be a mistake tocharacterize these plays as didactic, as it would be to write them offas farce. Stoppard's entire career has been an effort to absorb and

to work through Beckett, not to get around him. His rehabilitationof turn-of-the-century ideas cannot be traced to naivete or nostalgia;his attitude grows out of a peculiar postmodern world-wearinessbuoyed by wit. Jim Hunter, in Tom Stoppard's Plays (New York: GrovePress, 1982), is more alive to the subtlety of Stoppard's position, andhis book may be read as a corrective to Brassell's comparatively flat-footed comedy of ideas approach.

One benefit, though, of Brassell's assessment is that it positionsus to trace the trajectory of Stoppard's social vision, which hasdeveloped in a single-minded direction since the late sixties. The pro-tagonists of Stoppard's earliest plays appear to seek a vantage pointfrom which relativism and absurdity might be resolved into a meaning-ful pattern, an order beyond the human scale. In If You're Glad, I'llBe Frank (1966), Gladys, a human clock (she does the telephone com-pany's time voice), glimpses the temporal infinite, and is made dizzy.Albert, the philosophy student who gets a job painting bridges inAlbert's Bridge (1967), is distanced spatially. He loves peering down

at the human dots below, agreeing with Fraser, a would-be suicide,that from a vantage point like this, the idea of society is just about

4Quoted in Ronald Hayman, Tom Stoppard (London: Heinemann, 1977), p. 7.









tenable. ' Rosencrantz and Guildenstern similarly seek knowledge ofan extrinsic design, a pattern somewhere beyond their local darkness,which if revealed would explain it all. Then, in Jumpers (1972), whichnow looks like the decisive turning point in Stoppard's career, the questfor intellectual distance is renounced. From the Moon, Dotty realizes,all our absolutes must look like local customs of another place, 6but if so, that tells us only that we have jumped too far. After Jumpers,Stoppard decides to stand by the local customs of his adopted country(he was born a Czech); that is, he begins to celebrate the political systemof Great Britain, especially its tradition of civil liberties and an un-trammeled press. At the same time, he arrives at the conclusion thatthe quest to subordinate human scale to higher vantage points,

whether spatial, temporal, or ideological, leads to a retreat from humancontact and often to inhumane behavior. In short, he takes the advicethat the Devil gives to Don Juan in Act III of Shaw's Man and Super-man: Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an indis-criminate contempt for the Human. 7

This shift explains Stoppard's growing quarrel with Marxistideology and his focus in recent plays on the repression of human rightsin Eastern Europe. Of course, there are moral criticisms to be lodged

against the Western powers, too, and one may wonder whether thereis anything inevitable about Stoppard's having landed on the right sideof the political spectrum rather than the left. Certainly temperamentand biography have played a role; Stoppard was particularly angeredby the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. But also it followslogically from his epistemological quest that he should place a premiumon free expression and diversity of opinion. Stoppard now seems tothink that if Truth is undiscoverable, then local customs are all wehave to go on, and human beings must be allowed to evolve the patternof their social relations from the bottom up. Most importantly, peoplesshould be free to quarrel with their respective governments. On thatpoint, no compromise is possible. Stoppard's position thus hasremained consistent with his earliest thought, although it is onlyrecently that he has been attacked by the left as a benign reactionary.Politics aside, one of the most interesting aspects of Stoppard's path

STomStoppard,

Albert'sBridge

and OtherPlays (New

York: GrovePress, 1977),Albert's Bridge, p. 34.

6Tom Stoppard, Jumpers (New York: Grove Press, 1972), II, p. 75.7George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books,

1964), III, p. 174.

AFTER BECKETT 405








from absurdism and his commitment to earthbound events has beenhis rediscovery of realistic techniques, evident in such work as EveryGood Boy Deserves Favor, Night and Day, Professional Foul, TheReal Thing, and Squaring the Circle, his plays of the late seventiesand early eighties. In whatever form he works, Stoppard remains ourmost gifted and fascinating playwright.

Like Pinter's and Stoppard's work, Sam Shepard's plays haveshifted significantly in the decade past, from Rock and Roll phantas-magorias to plays that edge nearer to realism. Even so, his most com-pelling pieces - Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, True West,Fool for Love - never entirely cross the boundary to waking reality.Like his numerous early plays, which were surrealistic and fragmen-tary, spewing out shards of billboard images, Indian rituals, electronicmusic, and cowboy artifacts as if they were magical signs, these tighterdramatic entities harbor an inward vision that is passionately expressedbut never fully disclosed. When Shepard first read Waiting or Godot,it struck him that with words you could do anything Mottram, p. 7),yet his early theatrical pieces suggest that words are limiting unlessthey can be used to invoke visionary states or pure emotions. Thatis the impression given by La Turista, Operation Sidewinder, Cowboy

Mouth, The Tooth of Crime, and Geography of a Horse Dreamer.His more recent work continues in this conviction, although its terrainhas become more familiar. Shepard now writes about family, landownership, the curse of the American success ethic, failed fathers, theattempt to redefine a personal, if not a national, past, emotionalhunger, the death of love. The visual images in his plays try to telleverything at once: for instance, the empty farmhouse refrigerator withdoor ajar in Curse of the Starving Class.

Less intellectual than Pinter or Stoppard, Shepard seems moredifficult to write about. When analyzed, his plays flatten out dispro-portionately. They are better than they sound in discussion, perhapsbecause he is telling us things that we already know: America is hardon failures; to function, families disguise the truth. The plays are notso much about ideas as about the feelings that Shepard - and audi-ences - have about this unwelcome knowledge. Many of the early playsin particular quite defy plot summary. This is a point that becomesevident in Ron Mottram's Inner Landscapes: The Theater of Sam

Shepard, which relies heavily on that method. Mottram labors at thetask throughout the first half of his book but often is reduced todescribing an array of confusing images. By contrast, his penultimatechapter on Shepard's later family trilogy is cogent and rewarding,









no doubt because these plays lend themselves to more sustained dis-cussion.

Perhaps the most arresting of the plays is Buried Child, whichwon the Pulitzer Prize in 1979. As Mottram observes, the picture itpresents is the very antithesis of the Normal Rockwell image of rurallife (p. 138). Shepard astonishes the ear as well as the eye in this bleaklyjovial portrait of an American farm family all chewing their unsavorysecrets as if they were sitting down to a bountiful spread. The char-acters are not merely fractious but demented. They are infected bya strange Midwestern malady that corrodes the nerve endings and leavesthem incapable of human connection, although flowing with energy.They communicate by sharing visual symbols of ancient fertility rituals,

covering each other with corn husks and flowers, giving life-threateninghaircuts, knocking away wooden limbs, and raising up from the wetearth the unclean dead. They also talk a blue streak while they areat it, not to one another but to the world at large, composing a setof remarkable arias in the final act. As he lays dying, Dodge wills thefarm to his grandson, Vince, in a lengthy catalogue of implementsand related junk that reads like a Sears Roebuck transmogrificationof the Delphic Oracle. Vince accepts reintegration into the family andreunion with the land as if he were Orestes

bowingto the Furies. And

Halie, his grandmother, pronounces the ceremony complete as if shewere some ancient Sibyl presiding over the cursed but fecund land:

I've never seen such corn. Have you taken a look at it lately? Tall as a manalready. This early n the year. Carrots oo. Potatoes. Peas. It's like a para-dise, out there, Dodge. You oughta' ake a look. A miracle. I've never seenit like this. Maybe the rain did something. Maybe it was the rain.8

Despitethese

half-mocking,resonant allusions, we are still in Illinois,

and there is no mistaking Shepard's bilious vision of our heartlandhopes.

Shepard's talent may not be entirely disciplined, but already hehas accomplished much, and his promise is immense. Inner Landscapeshelps define the pattern of his work and invites other critics to takethe plays seriously, the early work as well as the late. Of course,Mottram's book is a preliminary study, and it should be judged inlight of its aims. In addition to offering a biographical sketch of theplaywright, it provides a comprehensive description of Shepard'sdramatic output to date, and presents thematic analyses interspersed

8Sam Shepard, Seven Plays (New York: Bantam, 1981), Buried Child, III, p. 132.

AFTER BECKETT 407








with quotations by the dramatist on his work. Its critical apparatusis descriptive, its context introductory. Future studies of Shepard, rely-ing on its groundwork, no doubt will supersede it, but as a firstappraisal, Inner Landscapes serves a purpose and does so without fussor pretension. It might be added that the book has been issued in paper-back at a very attractive price.

The continued productivity of Pinter, Stoppard, and Shepardsupports the contention that contemporary British and Americandrama has entered its most energetic phase in twenty years. Beckettand Albee are still at work, and there are other dramatists of demon-strable talent now writing, too, chief among them Peter Shaffer andDavid Mamet. Mamet, whose latest play, Glengarry Glen Ross, is dedi-

cated to Harold Pinter, brilliantly employs his mentor's gambit ofallowing subtext to carry the burden of meaning in works with minimalplots and halting dialogue. In Glengarry Glen Ross, Lakeboat, andAmerican Buffalo, he has created a semiotics of male code behaviorthat conveys by innuendo and unspoken thought a stark picture ofAmerican life in the 1970s and '80s. Shaffer, on the other hand, hasdemonstrated that our theater is still capable of soaring speech andlavish spectacle. The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Equus, and Amadeus

are ambitiousachievements that demonstrate the

scopeand

varietyof the contemporary stage. In addition to the playwrights mentioned,David Storey, Athol Fugard, Trevor Griffeths, Caryl Churchill, DavidRabe, Robert Wilson, Marsha Norman, Arthur Kopit, LanfordWilson, Simon Gray, Peter Nichols, Edward Bond, Arnold Wesker,and David Hare are all producing notable work. By this measure,drama in English is thriving in the 1980s, and that is exciting news.

Michael Hinden

University of Wisconsin, Madison


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