Pinter’s 2nd act: Playwright performs in his own play but fails to impress

By Joseph Hurley

A KIND OF ALASKA and ONE FOR THE ROAD, by Harold Pinter. A Gate Theatre Dublin production part of Lincoln Center Festival 2001 at Alice Tully Hall. July 2001.

Harold Pinter’s relatively brief plays, "A Kind of Alaska," (1982) and "One for the Road," (1984) are neither the best nor the most representative of his career since 1957.

Both have been staged in New York before, in mediocre productions at the Manhattan Theatre Club around a decade ago — they came and went without making much of a stir.

Unspectacular though the two plays are, they were selected to open the two-week Pinter tribute last week. This is the keystone of Lincoln Center’s current Festival 2001, and these Pinter shorts are part of the Gate Theatre Dublin’s contribution to the event.

This particular double bill was chosen to lead the nine-play Pinter parade because the author, who had never before acted on the New York stage, was available and was willing to face a New York audience in his local acting debut. Acting was his original career goal in the days when he toured Ireland as a member of a company headed up by the late Anew McMaster.

The venue for Pinter’s Manhattan debut was Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, a site better known for concerts and movies.

The opening work, "A Kind of Alaska," is suggested by the work of neurologist Oliver Sacks.

His book, "Awakenings," was first published in 1973. In it, Penelope Wilton plays Deborah, a British woman waking up after a sleep lasting 29 years. She is attended by Hornby, a medical professional played by Dublin’s Stephen Brennan, and supported by Brid Brennan (no relation).

"A Kind of Alaska" is an ongoing monologue interrupted by brief contributions from a pair of stage colleagues It comes over as a sort of exercise, as though it were the result of an extremely sophisticated end-of-term assignment made by an ambitious university theater professor.

What lifts "A Kind of Alaska" above the level of classroom work is the quality of the performance turned in by the actress playing the long-term sleeper, Deborah. The playwright, and his director, Karel Reisz, are fortunate in the casting of Wilton in a role with which she has been associated since at least April 1997, when the Gate staged the second of its three Pinter Festivals, the first having taken place in May 1994. The actress’s great strength is in the pellucid clarity with which she adjusts to the facts of those unredeemably "lost" 29 years.

Unlike Wilton, playwright Pinter in "One for the Road"cannot be expected to deliver anything appraoching the same all-clarifying performance.

"One for the Road," in its own way, carries the same quality of being a form of "exercise" that engulfs "A Kind of Alaska," though in a vastly different key. It is Pinter’s brief exercise, lasting only about 30 minutes, in probing the methods of heartless interrogation practiced in the totalitarian countries of Eastern Europe, and elsewhere, in the middle 1980s.

Both brief plays have been given impeccable production values, ranging from the sets and costumes of Liz Ascroft and the subtle, variable lighting by Mick Hughes. Where "A Kind of Alaska" is supplied with a hospital bed and a rising triangle of patterned parquet flooring, it is to "One for the Road" that the design team brings a semblance of otherworldliness, almost a darkly magical quality.

As Nicolas, the silk-smooth interrogator awaits the arrival of one or another of the individuals of the family he is questioning, whether it be the father (Lloyd Hutchinson), who appears twice, having suffered torture in between his visits, the mother (Indira Varma), or the briefly seen son, Nicky (Rory Copus), a pair of doors appears where none had been before, and the question is suddenly, strangely present.

On a simple but elegant Oriental rug, equipped with an elegant keyhole desk and a couple of suitable chairs, the interrogator, always on his feet, plays out his sly, vicious game, an ironic, subtly insinuating mixture of advancing and retreating, with Nicolas never clearly stating his real intentions.

Without argument, Pinter knows his own material, not to slight his intentions, but his diction and delivery suffered at times in the imperfect acoustics of Alice Tully Hall, an auditorium never really designed for the performance of plays, with actors turning this way and that in order to address each other.

— Joseph Hurley