THE STAGE

...In a recent dispatch in the Times [November 17], Juan de Onis wrote: "Despite their heavy losses, the guerrillas retain the ability to carry out nightly operations...

...For the most part, Spooner appears to be invulnerable to their barbs, until toward the end of the last act when he makes a determined plea for a permanent place in this strange mtnage---a place which he holds in any case since the Hirst establishment has its only reality on stage and Spooner, as abrasive presence, has been a part of it since the play began...

...For whatever reasons, the principal effect of the guerrilla ]ocos in one country after another has been political crisis leading to right-wing military dictatorship...

...Another possible explanation of American indifference is that revolution has been impending in South America for so long now that readers and editors alike have grown tired of waiting, and reporters are instructed to keep it short...

...That is about the most detailed description of the guerrilla side in this war which I've seen in six months...

...Even so, audiences are drawn into the best of his plays, moved sometimes by emotions that they cannot define for themselves...

...home...

...A third reason is the tendency of reporters to focus their attention on officials---repressive rightwing officials, in this case---and neglect the much broader, more complex and less accessible ferment of the people...

...THOMAS POWERS 'ABSOLUTELY AS IT IS' OOOOOOOOOOOOOO TIlE STAGE "But now, you see, I've grown up," Ralph Richardson told a New York Times interviewer [Nov...

...By now everyone knows (or should know: there are always 7 January 1977:20 a few baffled people in the audience demanding a tune they can whistle) that what is happening on Pinter's stage and to whom will not be explained...

...From one point of view this can be interpreted as another example of the traditional indifference of North Americans to everything which goes on in South America...

...I am not indifferent to civil liberties, but I also think the nature of what is happening in Argentina is distorted beyond recognition by the tendency to see it strictly as a matter of due process...

...Pinter characters are regularly beset by uncertainty about their identities --Stanley's shifting history in The Birthday Party, the old man's lost papers in The Caretaker--and about their memories, as in Landscape, Sience and Old Times...

...Groups like the Montoneros and ERP have sprung up, 'fought and been crushed in almost every Latin American country, sometimes (as in Guatemala, Peru and Bolivia) more than once...

...In Ma Nuit Chez Maud, for instance, we hear several stories about icy Commonweal: 21...

...guards...

...Then I remembered David Storey's Home, in which the playing of Richardson and Gielgud moved the play to a painfully effective ending...

...Gielgud's Spooner is primly outrageous, a beautiful construction put together with minute details of gesture, grimace, movement...

...7, 1976...

...Too many of the commentators on Pinter, faced with the playwright's refusal to explain himself, impose meaning on him, usually a kind of quivering metaphysics far too spongey for the dramatic solidity he puts on stage...

...each one tries to top the other until Hirst is ready to horsewhip Spooner for an insult to a woman whom neither of them may ever have known...

...An outsider, a stranger, who may not be a stranger really (v...

...This sfiding sense of reality only emphasizes that the theatrical moment is the closest in reality anyone can come to in a world with a redactable past and an unknown future...

...Somewhere around the house there is said to be an album in which memories are caught, frozen fixed, but we never see it since memories, in Pinter and in fact, have a way of borrowing from fiction...

...After several acts of remarkable talkmthreats, cajolery, reminiscence, aborted philosophy--in which the intruder or the status quo appears to be in danger, the play ends, usually with a restatement of the original situation or a variar on it, as in The Homecoming...

...But I have no idea who he was, or why he founded the ERP, or what he believed, or why he decided to launch military operations, or who joined his army, or what their reasons were for doing so...

...Old Times), is introduced into a static social or familial situationmas the derelict is in The Caretaker, the wife in The Homecoming...

...Whether the brutality of these regimes will lead in turn to a renewed, broader and ultimately more successful revolutionary movement remains to be seen...

...prison...

...There is a marvelous sequence in the second act, almost a parody of Oxcam-Home Counties gossip, in which the two old men begin to remember or invent old triumphs, old scandals...

...In Rohmer's previous films, speech precedes events...

...But it is clear there is more going on in the Southern cone than what reporters in Vietnam used to call "bang bang...

...You can describe the dynamiting of 30 bodies in a few paragraphs, where an attempt to identify the dead might take hundreds...

...And for a critic...

...The event in~ No Man's Land is a favorite one with Pinter...

...Pinter is a playwright first, a creator of dramatic events, the implications of which float free for the viewer to trap, take home, domesticate, do with what he will...

...His intricate connection with the small group is clear at the final curtain--not so much an ending as an abrupt breaking off of the action --when Hirst accepts Spooner's restatement of the "no man's land" that Hirst and all of them inhabit...

...The important question is not who is meanest and cruelest--the military wins hands down-but what the struggle is about, and who is going to win it...

...Although Terence Rigby, an old Pinter hand, and Michael Kitchen are doing good work with the other two roles, the chief pleasure of No Man's Land is watching Richardson and Gielgud work together...

...In one such attack on an arsenal near Buenos Aires last year the guerrillas lost 100 dead, proof not only that it had been a fierce battle indeed but that the guerrillas constitute a large and well-organized underground army...

...In No Man's Land the outsider is a down-at-heels poet, or perhaps a pub busboy who sounds and looks like one (Gielgud says he modeled his wardrobe on Auden's...

...Since No Man's Land never moved me, as The Caretaker does, as Old Times did in production, I found myself wondering if the virtuosity of the two performers had upstaged the play completely...

...The southern cone has been only one field of battle, although arguably the last...

...This is a delicate matter and I expect to be misunderstood, but all the same I think reporters have approached political violence in the southern cone as if the important question, the one overriding and decisive question, was whether or not the military is violating the civil rights of its victims...

...Their successive failures may represent a misreading of the people, or an underestimation of the CIA's counter-insurgency schools, or just the wrong way of going about a revolution...

...GERALD WEALES R O H ~ RENEWED 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 TIs SCREI In the last issue I outlined some of the ways in which Eric Rohmer's new film, The Marquise ot 0 . ~ breaks precedent with the "six moral tales" he made before it...

...This was not a solitary adventure by some half-organized group of idealistic students, but a continent-wide effort which has spanned a fifteen-year period, sparked dozens of risings, and left thousands dead...

...No Man's Land is the first Pin~er play in six years, but the audiences filling the Longacre are there less for the playwright's sake than for the chance to watch John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson perform...

...Still, No Man's Land has substance, characters, wit, verbal dexterity-all that one has come to expect from Pinter--and it would be foolish to let the memory of earlier achievements stand in the way of the new play...

...Hirst, obviously affluent, apparently a successful literary man, brings Spooner back to his house, to a fascinating circular room (tower...

...Argentina is in the middle of a violent revolutionary struggle, and yet the revolutionaries remain a complete cipher, with the result that they appear to the world as victims only...

...another of Pinter's menacing comic pairs, descendants of McCann and Goldberg in The Birthday Party, who spend a good part of the play tormenting Spooner, as Mick does the old man in The Caretaker...

...The leadership and structure of the Montoneros has not been decisively smashed, and several thousands armed extremists are believed to be operating, mainly in urban areas and industrial centers...

...The war in Argentina is only the most recent episode in a broader movement which began with Fidel Castro in Cuba in 1959, found persuasive theoreticians in Ch6 Guevara and Rtgis Debray, rejected the mass movement organizing efforts of the old Communist party, and attempted to spark the revolution with highly disciplined elite groups ready to resort to military means...

...But the most important reason, I suspect, is that the "story"--that is, the matrix of unstated assumptions which determine what a reporter puts in the first p~agraph--is "right-wing repression" rather than "revolutionary struggle...

...They are joined by Hirst's servants (keepera...

...I am I," says Spooner proudly, making his pitch for a job as well as a stranger, a supplicant as well as a free man, a busser of pintpots as well as a poet...

...hospital...

...As with the present, the past...

...I'm sure we're going to hear a great deal more about separatism in Quebec in the next year than we have about Latin American politics in the last ten...

...Any future here, as the age of the poets and some of their lines ("last lap of a race") suggest, is death...

...I would no more ask an author what he meant than I would ]ly.'" There was a certain amount of amiable puton in the Times piece, as Richardson and John Gielgud ramblingly recalled their adventures among the avantgatde dramatists, but the lines I have quoted seem to make good sense for an actor...

...No Man's Land, then, falls short of the best of Pi~termtoo many Pinteresque echoes perhaps, tinging immediacy with artifice...

...Robert Santucho's name has come up once or twice, just often enough to let me know he was the founder of the ERP, and that SIDE recently managed to hunt him down and kill him...

...But the guerrillas---whoever they are---aren't beaten yet...

...As Hirst, Richardson raises the reaction stare and the throwaway line to character definition...

...one of those enclosures in which Pinter so likes to trap his characters...

...Where they are all films about "mediocre" people to whom "nothing must happen," to put it in words from his characters' own mouths, The Marquise of 0 is a film in which everything happens: siege, molestation, rescue, unconscious rape, inexplicable pregnancy, resurrection from the dead, ostracism, public selfhumiliation, and, finally, reconciliation...

...The military seem to be winning the war--most estimates say that 90 per cent or more of the 1,200 Argentines killed so far ~ year are guerrillas or "leftists...

...Dangerous, too, for if I understand Pinter correctly, I may have invented the early Pinter plays in retrospect...

...tomb...