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Indeed,
the rehearsal process for Mountain Language revealed the
theme of parents and absent children in potent ways. Pinter has
addressed the subject of children in various ways over the course
of his career: in Betrayal they become connected with images
of adultery when a woman and her lover remember tossing one of their
children up into the air in one of their kitchens early on in the
affair. In his newest play Celebration, references to absent
children highlight the desiccation of the two marriages we see,
as during an anniversary celebration Julie says to Prue, "It’s
funny our children aren’t here. When they were young we spent
so much time with them, the little things, looking after them…
playing with them… being their mothers." In Moonlight,
a dying father is tormented by his two sons’ deliberate refusal
to visit him on his deathbed. But perhaps nowhere is the ache for
the missing child more potent than in Mountain Language.
To me personally, this became vividly clear because two weeks before
we began rehearsals, I gave birth to my first child. In the chaos
of organizing rehearsals, raising funds, casting and designing the
production and learning what it meant to be a mother at the same
time, I had failed to make adequate childcare arrangements and so
the tiny Lexie came to rehearsals every day in her carry cot and
gazed with silent round eyes at the proceedings.
Nothing is ever abstract when there is a child or an animal in rehearsal.
Everything suddenly becomes visceral, specific and real. When Jean
Stapleton sat across from Peter Reigert and her Voice-over said
"The baby is waiting for you," everyone in the room understood
how deeply this man was longing for the baby he has never seen,
and how little his mother had to say to him to trigger his feelings
for his child. For Peter Riegert, accustomed to playing the "bully"
Goldberg in The Birthday Party, the presence of a real baby
opened his heart in a simple and immediate way; no "acting"
was required.
With remarkable economy and simplicity, Mountain Language
asks enormous questions: What kind of world is it in which parents
are taken from their children, in which the most basic family relations
are ruptured? And in a world in which this routinely happens, how
do those ruptures ever get repaired? Perhaps because the play refuses
to answer those questions in any comfortable way, it has remained
a vivid and potent work ten years after its creation.
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