THE HOTHOUSE
Lyttelton Theatre, London SE1
Opened 18 July, 2007
****
Nearly all of Harold Pinter's plays are about one form or another of
non-communication, and most involve a power imbalance whether formal or
social. That much is common knowledge. However, we don't always grasp
the degree to which these are linked. It is obvious in his most overtly
political works, such as One For The
Road or Mountain Language,
that the oppressors will only be told what their victims think they
want to hear, or at any rate will delude themselves into only hearing
that much. But the same principle holds among, say, the parties to the
love triangle in Betrayal.
Pinter seems to be demonstrating that communication is possible only
between equals.
The Hothouse, written after The Caretaker in 1958 but only
premièred in 1980, appears to exemplify the imbalance of formal
power structures. This disintegrating "rest home" for unseen inmates of
an unspecified kind is peopled by archetypes of bureaucratic
politicking. There is the director, Roote, aware of little except his
desire to remain at the top; the too-assiduous underling, Gibbs, and
the knowing one who overplays his hand, Lush; Miss Cutts, ready to form
both office and sexual liaisons for her own ends; Lamb, whose eagerness
to please is brutally exploited. Of course, this is all a metaphor for
the iniquities of the world at large. The symbols are not hard to
discern: the home is an ill-maintained, ill-run place where all vectors
of personal interaction change at whim or are taken to extremes.
Hildegarde Bechtler's set is at once impersonal and universal, coated
in that shade of pale green paint only ever seen in old, tenth-rate
public buildings. And in the end, albeit briefly, the lunatics take
over the asylum.
When it is put like that, Pinter's own original dissatisfaction with
the play is understandable: its satire seemed forced to him, its
characters "cardboard". What redeems it is that other aspect of
Pinterishness, the communication or lack thereof: the way characters'
words and concepts slide past each other, lubricated by an apparently
common language but never meshing. It is this kind of slight
incongruity which is one of the hallmarks of Paul Ritter's performance:
always the same shape and size as the hole, but never quite settling
snugly into it. Ritter keeps alerting us that there is more to the
character than we see, and it makes him a perfect Pinter actor, even
whilst engaging here in broad comedy as Lush with a soda siphon and
several glasses of whisky. (Nowhere else in Pinter will you see gags as
blatant as these; there is even an exploding cigar, and silly wordplay en passant such as "Wobbles when
she walks?" – "Oh, possibly a trifle, sir.")
Finbar Lynch's Gibbs is precisely the kind of lieutenant one would be
terrified to have, and a reminder why he made such a good Cassius in Julius Caesar. Stephen Moore is
slightly more obviously incompetent, slightly less palpably dictatorial
than Pinter himself was in the role in the play's last major revival in
1995. Still, director Ian Rickson ensures that characters are properly
pitched not simply in themselves, but in all their interactions. Even
Leo Bill as Lamb, with an accent too affected to be at all credible,
shocks us as he remains visibly grateful to be allowed to help by being
subjected to interrogation and torture. Pinter's oldest associate,
Henry Woolf, has a cameo as the head janitor. The inmates' offstage
rebellion is conveyed by a soundtrack of groans and cackles more in
keeping with zombie or other horror movies, but these effects work.
Horror, in a personal and (of course) political sense, is also what
Pinter is about.
Written for the Financial Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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