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The
production opened with a line of women against the black wall of
the theater. The line existed as the audience entered the theatre;
every few moments, another woman would join the line, very slowly
and incrementally. Slowly the house lights went down, and there
was a long pause before the play began. The impression was that
the women had been standing there forever. The first scene happened
along the back wall, where these women (wives and mothers of the
imprisoned men) were taunted and harassed by prison guards. The
second scene, between an Elderly Woman and the Prisoner, occurred
on the platform under the bare bulb. During the third scene, the
mother and son remained in silhouette silent in their chairs while
behind them in a corridor of light, a Young Woman searched for her
imprisoned husband. Finally we returned to the Prisoner and his
mother under the bare bulb, as he fell to the floor trembling in
rage and despair at the terror of his mother in the face of prison
brutality. The effect of this staging was to allow the scenes to
accrue so that the tension and despair mounted as the play progressed.
With very little time between scenes, the audience was never offered
a moment of relief until long after the final blackout.
In preparing for rehearsals, Pinter and I discussed whether it might
not be more effective to speak the play in an American dialect for
American audiences, and whether we might make certain textual emendations
(e.g. "John Doe" for "Joseph Dokes", "guy"
for "bloke") so that the piece would feel more immediate
in America. In part this discussion arose out of Pinter’s concern
that American audiences, in their smug security, would view the
play as a parable about horrors that happened elsewhere rather than
as something to be reckoned with about our own culture. As we worked,
however, it quickly became obvious that transposing the piece to
American was not only unnecessary, it was wrong. As is always the
case with Pinter’s work, it is the quality and the sound of
the language that makes the material so riveting. What interests
Pinter is the English language and how that language, his own language,
can be manipulated and distorted to inflict violence on another
person. In trying to Americanize the play, we were weakening the
potency of the language and literalizing the events and characters
Pinter had created, which was not useful. Oddly enough, for us,
because the language of the play is not literally recognizable as
our own, it ultimately takes on a far greater universality. By maintaining
the "Britishisms" of Pinter’s language, our audiences
were never tempted to ask what Southern army base this was set in
or what part of America the Young Woman came from. The scenes sprang
into relief, against the stark, bare-bulb world of the scenery,
like brutal snapshots that the audience could absorb and examine
one frame at a time.
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