In the theatre, some trades are like carpentry, their virtuosity more or less subsumed in the thing made: a lifetime of experience of things other than wood may lie in the joints and dowels, the grain and the glue, but it is the accommodation and proportion of the finished chair that it draws attention to. Other tasks are like the making of stained glass, which may be as devotional and also as practical, but which cannot but broadcast the flair of the design, the particular vision of the artist. If good acting starts as an example of the latter case, and at its very best approaches the inspired anonymity of the former, then directing and writing, safeguarding and requiring each other, are of the former. It is perhaps no accident that Arthur Miller has a passion for woodwork comparable to his energy as a playwright.

The three jobs are certainly specialised, seeming to call for different profiles: it is rare to find two of the talents in the same person, leave alone three. We do not know if Shakespeare was a good actor, and there was no such thing as a director in his day; Molière’s entrepreneurial skills (or at least his understanding of patronage) are beyond doubt, but it seems that his desire to be a tragedian was at odds with an inevitably comic stage persona, and so the writer in him had little competition. Chekhov delivered brilliant brief insights, usually in letters to his wife, into how his plays should be acted, but I think he would never have had the patience or forbearance to co-ordinate the traffic of a whole production, so those qualities were reserved for his writing instead: and history is silent on his acting potential.

Putting together a collection of essays about a living writer carries a special sense of excitement, even danger. Harold Pinter, at the age of seventy, is still extremely active, and prominent, as a playwright, as the double bill of The Room, his first play, and Celebration, his latest, at the Almeida Theatre in spring 2000, demonstrated: he also directed both plays. His acting career continues, for example with his role of Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park. Later in the year, Remembrance of Things Past, a stage version of The Proust Screenplay, was produced at the Royal National Theatre. Meanwhile, there is a steady stream of productions of earlier plays, written over a period of more than forty years, both in English and in translation, which ensures a continuing refreshment and reappraisal of the whole range of Pinter's work. Pinter the dramatist is protean: his writing moulds itself apparently effortlessly to the forms of radio and television, as well as to the stage, and several plays have been successful in all three media. Major plays - major, in terms of length - have been successfully adapted for film, and Pinter has had an additional career as an outstanding screenwriter, perhaps most notably in conjunction with Joseph Losey. He was a poet before he became a playwright, and has written a novel and a substantial number of essays.

In 1956 Harold Pinter trod the boards in Bournemouth and Torquay in over thirty thrillers and comedies, the standard repertory company staple of the pre- and post-war periods, while J. B. Priestley, Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan dominated the West End theatre with comforting spiritualism, stylish comedy of manners and sentimentalised social problem play, all designed to reassure the self-applauding middle-class patrons, through laughter or tears. Alternatively, by the early 1950s, the plays of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams with their contrasting realistic modes of incidental expressionism (Death of a Salesman, 1949) and passionate naturalism (A Streetcar Named Desire, 1947) were quite free from the all-constrictive self-censorship of the British class system dominated by virtual terror of the vulgar and lower class. Along with changing post-war social conditions the seeming freedom signalled by the Americans provided an impetus for the rise of the Angry Young Men (pre-eminently John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and John Arden) at the Royal Court Theatre, from the annus mirabilis of 1956. Of equal importance, but less sensational in immediate impact was the translation of French absurdism, most famously Samuel Beckett and Eugçne Ionesco, to London productions at the Arts Theatre (respectively, Waiting for Godot, 1955; The New Tenant, 1956).

My intention in this chapter is to deal with a particular public image of Pinter, that is the image of Pinter as playwright. This image was first constructed by the press, and specifically by theatre reviewers, in the early phases of Pinter's writing career, and has been further cultivated by the reviewers in the later phases of this playwright's career. Yet, I argue, Pinter, acknowledging the reviewers' construct of his dramatic style, does not remain passive. He chooses to respond to the critics in a unique mode, seemingly collaborative at first, but ultimately trapping them.

In order to provide an overview of Pinter’s career, presenting the ‘Pinter’ construct, on the one hand, and the playwright’s mode of response, on the other, I have chosen to focus on three highlights: first, the consolidation of the construct throughout Pinter’s process of acceptance by the critical community and Pinter’s ‘semi-collaborative’ response; secondly, an unpredictable poetic move, manifested by Pinter’s mid-career play A Kind of Alaska, and the reviewers’ conduct in this case; and thirdly, Pinter’s recent play Ashes to Ashes, the culmination of his ‘political phase’, yet another mode of poetic response to the critics, together with the critical reaction it elicited. This chapter will look particularly at the London productions of Pinter’s plays, and consequently with the reviews appearing in the London press.

If the “first duty of the artist,” as Stoppard proposes in Artist Descending a Staircase, “is to capture the radio station,” the second must be to capture television. Between them, these two domestic media command such giant audiences that they effectively shape modern taste. Playwrights cannot, in good conscience, let media so powerful escape them. Yet what constitutes their “capture” is not easy to say. Have radio and television been captured for drama when they broadcast a play that is suited to the stage; or have they merely been borrowed for alien purposes? Is radio, in particular, hospitable to drama; or does its invisible stage create impediments that playwrights may disguise, but not really transcend? Does television, for its part, have a nature of its own, with which drama may comport; or is it nothing but cinema at a double disadvantage: bright room, small screen? Vexing questions, every one, for a playwright like Stoppard, who has captured the theatre through impeccable stagecraft - that is, by treating the stage as the partner of words in making meaning in the theatre. Unless equivalent craft can be exercised in radio and television, Stoppard’s “duty” to capture these behemoths of popular culture would seem wholly uninviting.

So it is that, in writing plays for broadcast, Stoppard probes the very nature of the domestic broadcast media. Seeking always to differentiate radio and television, not only from the theatre but also from each other, he attempts to discover what constitutes a stage on air and on screen, then induces each stage to speak in its own oblique language. The result is that Stoppard makes an elegant case on the radio for the medium’s special expressivity in drama, while on television he pioneers in exploring the expressive dimensions of a medium that has yet to discover its idiom. Stoppard’s work leaves no doubt that radio and television can be captured for drama just as he favors: they can both be enlisted to reflect a play’s point, to enhance it, even sometimes to augment it.

This book takes a new look at Tom Stoppard’s drama, fiction, and screen-writing nearly forty years after his work began appearing before audiences. Most contributors agree that the Stoppard style in 2000 is recognizable but fundamentally changed from his self-conscious dandyism of the 1960s and early 1970s. As Stoppard has continued to write, his later work has not only extended his early preoccupation with memory, uncertainty, and ethics but also deepened the sense of human consequence growing from ethical conflict and intellectual doubt. In the past ten years, as many of the book’s chapters suggest, Stoppard has overcome the charge of emotional coldness, especially the claim that he had failed to represent human love. In slowly dropping his emotional guard, he has imbued his writing with a depth of compassion hinted at in the early work through his consistent appeals to humor.

These chapters are written to introduce both first-time and experienced readers of Stoppard’s novel and plays to the critical tradition that has grown up alongside them from the late 1960s to the present. Most offer the added value of viewing the earlier work through the lens of the later, suggesting both a continuous shifting of Stoppard’s technique and dramatic architecture and a continuity of theme over four decades of writing. In showing us, for example, how a 1967 play like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (R&GAD) both prepares for and inhabits the 1998 screenplay Shakespeare in Love, the chapters encourage us to read Stoppard’s writing as a series of transformational exchanges between texts quoted in the plays, between the history and fiction represented by the plays, and between the writing early and later in his career. This exchange, initiated by the author but completed by “knowing” readers and spectators, is the secret to the pleasure of Stoppard’s plays. It is the hope of this collection to intensify that pleasure for all who use it.

Stoppard thinks of himself as “quite an eclectic writer. I … finish a piece of work and by the time I'm talking about it I'm already fascinated with something none of you knows about.”The plays to be discussed in this chapter, Travesties (1975), Night and Day (1978), and The Real Thing (1982), form a surprising trio to readers and audiences who expect the similarity of tone and theme that you find in, say, Arthur Miller or in Samuel Beckett. But Stoppard’s plays seem to be as unlike each other as like, taking up now Hamlet, now philosophy, now chaos mathematics, now Eastern European politics, now India, now journalism, now visual art, now poetry, now nineteenth-century Russia. He writes about heterosexual love and homosexual love; he writes brilliant roles for both male and female actors, for old men and young boys, for old women and girls, and for actors of many races. “Eclectic” puts it mildly.

But surely we do mean something when we talk about “Stoppardian” qualities in a play, and these three plays offer the best evidence of those qualities because they are least like each other in both content and spirit. At the most obvious level, these plays share word-intoxicated characters (“I tend to put most of my money on a clarity of utterance … I don’t understand the speech structures of people who are inarticulate or ungrammatical”). Stoppard’s immense vocabulary and complex sentence structure shape his characters as well as their dialogue. (As he told Michael Billington, referring to Night and Day, “When I write an African president into a play I have to contrive to make him the only African President who speaks like me.”)

Introduction: delimiting ‘the political’

Pinter's theatre is a theatre of images involving domestic violence, territorial struggles and linguistic conflict. As the conflictual range of responses indicates, the dramatic syntax of these images remains paratactic, both generically and linguistically, difficult to articulate as tragicomedy or through the existing grammar of social relations. Events and relationships are framed within socially intelligible and dramatically 'powerful' situations in ways which resist the dramatic conventions of naturalism or realism. The tension between rhetoric and grammar enables a figurative diversity of conversation which has come to seem recognisably 'Pinteresque', a comically pregnant moment of conversation which dwells in a menacingly tragic absence of social recognition. The enigmatic particularity of dramatic images is both a principle of dramatic construction in Pinter’s work and a key dynamic in performance. Precise theatrical presentation makes it difficult to describe or narrate the suggestive power of these images in non-dramatic or nontheatrical terms. As Pinter himself put it: ‘To supply an explicit moral tag to an evolving and compulsive dramatic image seems to me facile, impertinent and dishonest.’ To interpret his plays symbolically or allegorically also does violence to Pinter’s precise art. But to the extent that his images generate metaphors of more general concerns, they need to be considered as sociopolitical representations of power.

At the age of eleven Tom Stoppard met Hamlet - on the screen in Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film. Six years later, at the beginning of his career as a journalist, Stoppard formalized his relationship with the cinema. The presence of a movie theatre next to one of the Bristol newspapers where he worked - and where he and other reporters spent numerous hours on “assignment” - was one source; another was his appointment as film critic on the Bristol Evening World, soon to be supplemented by work as a film columnist for the Western Daily Press. Such exposure enhanced his sense of the visual as well as his fascination with the creative possibilities of action, point of view, and dramatic dialogue. Mixed with his admiration for movie culture - he interviewed such stars as Diana Dors and Albert Finney - it is no surprise that as his career developed, he would have his own work optioned by the studios and be asked to adapt the work of writers he admired for the screen. The job paid well and he was able to graft his talent for dialogue on to the plots of others.

Adaptations, rather than original screenplays, became Stoppard’s métier; through adaptation, he developed a lucrative secondary talent as a “script doctor.” From Nabokov’s Despair to Graham Greene’s The Human Factor and John le Carré’s The Russia House (and most recently, Enigma, a script based on the Robert Harris novel dealing with espionage and the Bletchley Park decoding project during World War Two), Stoppard showed himself to work best in film with the work of others. While finding the money terrific, he welcomed the work as a break from searching for original play ideas.

In his 1967 review of the New York production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Robert Brustein dismissed its author as a mere “university wit” who achieved his success by offering audiences “a form of Beckett without tears.” That specific criticism has continued to dog the plays of Tom Stoppard throughout his now lengthy and distinguished career. The major argument with Stoppard’s theatre has always been that it is far too cerebral, too emotionally barren: all head and no heart. “That particular duality has become a bit of a cliché about me,” Stoppard concedes. And it is a cliché that gets repeated in almost every profile of the dramatist ever written: thus his plays are perceived, one journalist states, as “avoid[ing[ emotion”; another describes them as often appearing “cold, frigid, impossibly remote”;4 a third comments that, to many spectators, “a dynamo and not a heart lay beneath his work’s surface, … and it pumped a kind of icy adrenaline, not blood.” “If I filed my cuttings,”Stoppard has wryly noted, “I would no doubt have a pretty thick too-clever-by-half envelope.”

This critical tide was stemmed to some degree by the appearance of The Real Thing in 1982, which surprised audiences in much the same way that the publication of A. E. Housman’s collection of romantic verse A Shropshire Lad reputedly surprised Housman’s own family; in Stoppard’s recent play about Housman, The Invention of Love, one of Housman’s sisters is said to have exclaimed, “Alfred has a heart!” Suddenly, it seemed, Stoppard too had a “heart” – except, of course, that it was hardly sudden. Stoppard’s early plays were indeed clever (perhaps even, in some instances, too clever by three-quarters), but there was always an emotional pulse beating steadily beneath all that surface erudition and irony. What “suddenly” changed with The Real Thing was that this self-confessed “very private sort of person”8 was no longer afraid to wear his heart openly on his sleeve in a play dealing specifically with the emotionally charged topic of love.

In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud explains that three people are required for the successful telling of a tendentious or purposeful joke. '[In] addition to the one who makes the joke, there must be a second who is taken as the object of the hostile or sexual aggressiveness, and a third in whom the joke's aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled.' In other words, jokes are constructed like theatrical events, and are verbalised for the purpose of pleasing or impressing an audience. If this were not the case, there would be no point in saying the joke aloud: the joke-maker could simply think his amusing thoughts for his own pleasure. The fact that the joke-maker goes to the effort of actually telling the joke shows that he is not the primary receiver of pleasure, that the joke is being told for the purpose of creating a relationship with someone else.

Thus the public telling of a joke creates recognisable positions: the aggressor, the victim and the audience. Furthermore, the act of telling a joke forces everyone within earshot to become a part of the event: there is no neutral position. To be within earshot is to be involved: merely to listen to a joke is to declare oneself one way or the other, to be compromised. The third party, the audience, is forced to take sides in the conflict between the joke-teller and the victim: to laugh is to ally oneself with the aggressor, to refuse to laugh is to ally oneself with the victim. Comedy thus functions as a sort of litmus test for the audience. Will they laugh or not laugh? With whom will they side?

In an early Tom Stoppard play, After Magritte (1970), Detective Inspector Foot seeks to explain the opening tableau, announcing a series of increasingly bizarre theories that are capped only by the real explanation. What is here used playfully, elsewhere in Stoppard’s work takes on more serious dimensions. Tom Stoppard is as fascinated by systems of logic as was Jonathan Swift, and as suspicious of them. From Stoppard’s very earliest work, audiences were drawn into worlds that declared themselves as rationally coherent, even as the events of the plays set out to demolish the evidence. This dualistic structuring is reflected in the way in which Stoppard balances and opposes thematic material in his plays: classicism and romanticism; imagination and science; free-will and determinism; and so on. Stoppard’s suspicion of logical constructs is predicated on a belief in the supremacy of the individual and the particular over the determined and the enforced; his fascination with them comes from his firm sense that there must be order for the aspirations of the individual to flourish.

This duality is central to any political consideration of Stoppard’s work. For his sternest critics, it is taken to be at best evasive; for his admirers it is simply a part of the questioning stance that Stoppard has made peculiarly his own, and is looked for in each new piece. A perfect example can be found in Squaring the Circle (1984), where the narrator talks of the efforts of Solidarity to reconcile the irreconcilable in Poland: “an attempt was made to put together two ideas which wouldn’t fit, the idea of freedom as it is understood in the West, and the idea of socialism as it is understood in the Soviet empire.” The attempt would fail because it was as impossible as turning “a circle into a square with the same area – not because no one has found out how to do it, but because there is no way in which it can be done.”

In my epigram I adopt Wallace Stevens’s opening gambit from “Connoisseur of Chaos”for two reasons (which may be one). First, it is necessary to drive home the point early that Stoppard and his plays will frustrate any attempt to impose an either/or logic in terms of their relationships to postmodern ideas and aesthetics. “None of us is classifiable,” Stoppard once told David Nathan. “Even the facility to perceive and define two ideas such as classical and romantic in opposition to each other indicates that one shares a little bit of each.”The comment was made in the specific context of elucidating Arcadia (and this provides the second reason for invoking Stevens’s chaotic connoisseur) but Stoppard’s work in general, and his relationship to postmodernism in particular, is increasingly informed by this notion, which reaches its fullest expression in his 1993 masterpiece.

Thus, the split/doubled title of this chapter indicates that Stoppard expresses keen interest in certain intellectual, aesthetic, and ideological positions associated with postmodern art and drama, while he is at the same time antipathetic to, and even staunchly critical of, some of the more radical notions and claims of postmodern social theory and its image of the human subject. Stoppard does not, then, fully inhabit the postmodern terrain, but he often travels there and traverses it, speaking the language of the region faultlessly even as he stops occasionally to arraign it with deadpan irony or wit. As he investigates such postmodern issues as the death of the author, the loss of sustaining cultural narratives, the waywardness of language, and the fragmented nature of identity, Stoppard nevertheless exhibits a critical distance and negative capability toward the social, cultural, and aesthetic theories that constitute the loosely confederated discourse of postmodernism.

Harold Pinter's artistic achievements and political activities have made him a celebrity. Like most processes of enlargement or amplification, fame can distort that to which it draws attention, and, as early as 1971, Pinter was making distinctions between his own perception of himself and his public image:

Pinter’s complaint recalls a more recent observation of Salman Rushdie’s, that, ‘There’s a fictitious version of me. I’m conscious that when I meet people, I can see them erasing the tape. They’re erasing a whole bunch of things they’ve read in the papers’. Nor is this phenomenon apparent only to those affected; the journalist Robert Cushman has written that Pinter’s fame has created ‘this thing in the public consciousness – this cryptic, aloof, uncommunicative thing called ‘‘Pinter’’ . . . [which] seems to have little to do with the man himself’. This apparent gap between public perception and reality is one of several problematic aspects to the dramatist’s celebrity.