Room, Interior

Harold Pinter’s first

The Room by Harold Pinter

Claustrophobia is not meant to be funny, and it’s not often funny watching someone suffer from it in real time. But the idea is still funny. You mean to say you’re afraid of rooms? Of being inside? Of being away from many of the things that can attack you and harm you and cause you strain?

Agoraphobia, too, can be funny. You mean to tell me that being outside makes you afraid? Outside — where all good things tend to happen or at least to begin. That outside. Are we speaking the same language?

I suppose one can take this too far.

Back to claustrophobia for a moment. You can push talking about that too far, too. You can go to extremes.

You’re really afraid of being underground, someone might say — locked in a coffin? Coffins are pleasantly lined; they’re well made and safe. Surely you know that it’s the only way to stop the wolves from eating you? Why would you want to make being eaten by wolves more likely? And so on.

Ridiculous, of course, but there’s some mileage in all of this.

I suppose it’s just possible now that some readers will forget that the late and sainted Harold Pinter — for whom awards and university departments and libraries are named — was at least as much an actor as he was a writer. That you could find him acquiring himself admirably in the teleplay version of Rogue Male, the one that starred Peter O’Toole, for instance.

In my mind, therefore, I just can’t think of Pinter as other people tend to see him — I just can’t think of the poet who struck me as vulgar and boring at school as a great sage. Instead, I think of Pinter — especially in these early works — as an actor. As an actor exceptionally good at thinking of atmosphere and mood and dialogue. All of it designed to create a lot with a little, and intended to give those on stage capacity to show (and help in showing) off what they can do.

The early Pinter plays are full of horror. Horror at the threats, or sudden intrusions, of violence. Fear of being carted off to an institution by strong hands labelled, as if in a cartoon, with the stamp of authority. Death or injury; terrible mistreatment; misunderstanding, leading to something far worse. Fear of all of that.

But they are also, because they’re so minimal, so forbidding, quite funny. This is not unique to Pinter and his view of menace. As Billy Wilder and others found, there’s something very comical in the figure of the gangster who could have you shot full of holes and is trying his best to do so. Some of this is intentional, as in Some Like It Hot.

But even in supposed dramas, we can laugh at the absurdities of villainy. The ridiculous, rouged gangster creature played by Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo, for instance, is almost a drag act. With his dressing gowns and slopping tumblers of something strong. He really does mean to kill our heroes. But he’s still funny. Or at least he is to me.

You can laugh at horror when it’s overt and flagrant. People have told me for many years that the Final Destination films are camp and hilarious. I know people who shriek with laughter watching Saw (the first one of which, at least, is actually good).

I’m not going to claim that The Room is especially funny. Other plays of Pinter’s have the despairing humour a touch closer to the front. It’s a little more available. The Dumb Waiter is, because it is so absurd, so purposeless, so dependent on trivia and then, eventually, surprise, a good deal funnier.

I can’t say The Room is so obviously comic — though I’ll give it a try. Perhaps the way one of the characters, Bert, talks about driving his van is funny. Perhaps the arrival of the landlord, Mr Kidd, is always meant to be played for surreptitious laughs, like the turning up of a stock character in an old comedy. (Here’s the landlord, yet again, as if this is a Dublin slum. I wonder if he’ll up the rent?)

So many of these plays are memorable, not because of the things the characters say or even do, but for other reasons. Action and dialogue’s all busy work, bits of business for the actors to use for support. The plays are memorable instead because they convey an impression.

So much of The Room is drowned out by the legend of its own making. It was the first play Pinter ever wrote; he and the recipient of the text later disputed how fast Pinter had written it. One of them said four days; the other, two. I don’t imagine it matters.

But I must say you can tell it was written that quickly. It’s not a finished or polished piece. There’s no resolution — although in a world where Godot exists, that’s hardly criticism or impediment. The conclusion is, despite its violence, childish, laughable. You could see it and be shocked either into fright or into giggling.

This play’s a mood, a vibe. How you take it is very much your decision. Quite up to you. Unlike the rest of your life, your life as contained in the room.