Minus the Menace: Pinter's New-Old Hothouse
Weales, Gerald
Stage MINUS THE MENACE PINTER'S NEW-OLD HOTHOUSE HAROLD PiNTER'S latest play, The Hothouse, began at Hampstead, the enterprising London theater which first produced The Elephant Man and which...
...The titular hothouse is an institution to which the Ministry, unidentified, assigns patients who are apparently never cured...
...or so insist the quotations from reviews that placard the theater...
...The Hothouse was written in 1958, Pinter says in a program note, and put aside until 1979 when he reread it, decided it was stageworthy and "made a few cuts but no changes...
...GERALD WEALES Commonweal: 466...
...Not that the latest Pinter play is a new play...
...I saw two examples when I passed through London recently, Tom Courtenay in Ronald Harwood's The Dresser, and Glenda Jackson in Andrew Davies's Rose...
...Only occasionally does one of the playwright's characteristic duels of understatement manufacture theatrical electricity, and there is only one extended speech which can be compared favorably with the best of early Pinter...
...Stylistic devices aside, The Hothouse seems to belong with The Birthday Party because, like Party, it offers the kind of incipient social/political comment that made early Pinter enthusiasts try to reduce his plays to messages...
...The Hothouse moved on to a successful West End run and, presumably, if matters follow their usual course, it will soon find its way to New York...
...I suppose that there is a serious statement about the interchangeability of inmates and staff, of the certifiably sick and the presumably healthy, but to me The Hothouse is largely an elaborate joke which does not work very well...
...The hothouse is hot in fact, since the steamheat is on full blast although the day is a mild one (a line about the snow's turning to slush is used repeatedly, a joke and a weapon), but the title is obviously intended to suggest an artificial enclosure, forcing growth unnaturally...
...and, furthermore since the action takes place on Christmas day and the father of the newborn baby is unknown...
...The central assumption of Rose, that life consists of inevitable personal and professional failure, is countered by the quirky idealism of the protagonist, the witty delineation of some of the peripheral characters (notably Rose's old mum) and a fine ironic performance by Jackson...
...Pinter's use of conventional mystery-story elements in plays like The Birthday Party and The Dumb Waiter was successfully transformed into that unanchored sense of fear, at once funny and frightening, which saddled him with the label, comedy of menace, that he spent years trying to escape...
...Two events among the patients — a death and a birth — bring the situation to a head, and the play ends with an epilogue in which we learn that the entire staff, except for the assistant director, has been murdered, presumably by the patients...
...The man with the van from The Birthday Party has come with a vengeance...
...Glenda Jackson is better served by the Davies script about a teacher, stifled by her school administration, who is also a woman trapped in a dead marriage...
...There is a scene in The Hothouse in which a young staff member, a garrulous innocent, is broken by two colleagues in a cross-question routine that recalls the verbal assault on Stanley by Goldberg and McCann...
...The play is a stultifying collection of show-business bromides, bearable only when Courtenay is onstage and talking...
...The audience, schooled in horror movies, knows (or suspects) that the icily menacing Gibbs did in his own colleagues, but since this is a Pinter play, details of the plot remain elusive...
...In the program for the first American production of a Pinter play, the Actor's Workshop production of The Birthday Party in San Francisco (1960), there is a director's note in which Glynne Wickham gives a very explicit social interpretation of the play...
...A particular English offering, less familiar in this country, is the star's play, the work that seems to have been stitched together as an excuse to allow a popular performer to take the stage...
...It is, then, the second full-length Pinter play, and it is hardly surprising that, having not yet looked at the program, I found myself thinking of The Birthday Party all through the first act, a spontaneous comparison by which The Hothouse suffers...
...all this sci-fi 29 August 1980:465 paraphernalia robs the scene of the intensity which the presence of three actors on stage gave the early play...
...This speech, in which Lush reports on his conversation with the dead patient's mother, is a catalogue of English countryside festivities, occasions on which the woman somehow failed to appear at the asylum...
...one goes to see Glenda Jackson...
...The Hothouse unhappily suggests parody without menace...
...The plants that grow here are tensions among the staff...
...Stage MINUS THE MENACE PINTER'S NEW-OLD HOTHOUSE HAROLD PiNTER'S latest play, The Hothouse, began at Hampstead, the enterprising London theater which first produced The Elephant Man and which recently offered Sam Shepard's Buried Child to baffled English audiences (baffled English reviewers really...
...A play like The Hothouse is available only because it is packaged as summer fun...
...For the most part, however, The Hothouse is more interesting as a sample of early Pinter work than it is as a play in its own right...
...Going to London theater in the summer is rather like going to Broadway during the same season...
...Courtenay plays a drunken homosexual theatrical dresser trying to get a dying Shakespearean actor on stage for one last Lear...
...The usual choices are among celebrated musicals, long-run farces, and posh revivals...
...Without her, Rose would probably turn into the soap opera it occasionally aspires to be, but one doesn't go to see Rose...
...Significance seekers should have a marvelous time with the play because the characters are given names like Roote (the director who is stabbed: cut out root and . . .), Lamb (the innocent victim), Miss Cutts, Lush...
...It suggests the interior-decoration monologue in The Caretaker and like that speech, it is a very funny turn in which the comic content exists outside the aggressive use for which the speaker is fashioning his words...
...the mysterious Monty, to whom Stanley is taken in that play, has been transformed into a bureaucracy...
...the play is a round robin of confrontation scenes in which first one, then another of the characters dominates through politely threatening speeches or by a refusal to react to such speeches...
...In the new play, the interrogators are offstage Voices and the victim is isolated in a glass booth...
...It would be easy to treat The Hothouse in the same way...
Vol. 107 • August 1980 • No. 15
