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In
his 1965 speech "Writing for the Theatre," Pinter famously
commented, "There are two silences. One where no word is spoken.
The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed.
When true silence falls, we are still left with echo but are nearer
nakedness." One of the rich discoveries of Mountain Language
is that, if language is a tool of oppression, silence can be unspeakably
intimate and ultimately hugely liberating. When I first read the
play, the sections that startled me the most were the "speeches"
that occurred in silence, indicated by the stage direction "Voices
over." Pinter employs an innovative technique in Mountain
Language to indicate a kind of telepathic communication between
characters who cannot or will not speak aloud: as they face each
other, their thoughts travel between them over the sound system
via pre-recorded text, so that we are literally privy to their most
private communication. What is arresting about these "voice-overs,"
in the context of the brutal environment of the play, is their beauty,
grace and sense of hope. To my mind, they represent among the most
lyrical writing of Pinter’s oeuvre, and the most deeply felt.
For example, in Scene 3 ("A Voice in the Darkness"), a
husband and wife are separated by prison guards; he is hooded and
has been hurt. They face each other in the prison hall and between
them travels a kind of telepathic language of infinite tenderness.
In the silence, he "says" to her: "I watch you sleep.
And then your eyes open. You look up at me above you and smile."
And she replies: "You smile. When my eyes open, I see you above
me and smile." In the privacy of their silence, the last refuge
from their oppressors, two people find a language of love that momentarily
lifts them out of the horror of their experience. Then the man collapses,
the woman screams, and it is over.
These "telepathic" sections remind one of the lyrical
memories of first love in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape,
and as with Krapp, their potency is enhanced by the contrast
between their hope-filled tenderness, and the desiccated loneliness
of the current situation. "I lay down across her with my face
in her breasts and my hand on her," Krapp’s younger self
describes, as his older self listens grimly, "We lay there
without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up
and down, from side to side." We discovered that we could not
record the Voice-overs of Mountain Language immediately after
having rehearsed a scene, because the actors’ devastation came
through in their voices. The tone of the Voice-overs had to rise
above the horror, a momentary glimpse of joy and connection in a
joyless, empty world.
When Mountain Language was first produced in London, Pinter
had been engaged among other things in the struggle of the Kurdish
people in Turkey, and the play was read as an expose of Turkish
atrocities. Reading it now, ten years later, what strikes me is
not its specificity but its aching universality. Pinter seems to
have posed the question to himself: at times of extreme terror,
what matters most? What allows an individual to go on? How do we
endure? An oppressive government can take away everything: privacy,
autonomy, dignity, food, health. What it cannot legislate are feelings.
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