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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 168 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 168, October 1993.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Moonlight
by Harold Pinter
At the end of the 1950s Harold Pinter revolutionised British drama with such plays as The Birthday Party and The Caretaker. A whole new language was born – oblique yet crystalline, often savagely funny.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s Pinter became politically sharper, using his sensitivity to words and the pattern of speech to strip bare establishment hypocrisy and pretention in his plays such as No Man’s Land. More recently he has opted for a more overt political message, although much of his best work has been in screenplays for films such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman and, most recently, The Trial.
Moonlight is described as Pinter’s first full length play for 15 years and it returns to the style and themes of earlier years. The themes are death and family relationships – or rather the alienation of family relationships. A bedridden middle aged man is dying. By turns, he snarls in frustration and whines in self pity while his wife sits by him with her embroidery. In another bedroom two brothers seem to be plotting their inheritance. As the play unfolds, they discuss a meeting of trustees which becomes more and more like a meeting of shareholders and directors.
Although Pinter himself says that Moonlight is not a political play, it nevertheless has an underlying political content. Pinter’s trademark – more than all the pauses and tricks of dialogue which have come to be known as Pinteresque – is his ability to dissect, expose and mock the most subtle class differences.
The language the two brothers use mimics the pompous absurdity of business language: ‘My father was a very thorough man. He invariably brought the meetings in on time and under budget and he always kept a weather eye open for blasphemy, gluttony and buggery ... My father adhered strictly to the rule of law.’ ‘Which is not a very long way from the rule of thumb.’ ‘Not as the crow flies, no’.
With Ralph, a ‘family friend’, Pinter captures the middle class philistine: ‘Your father could never be described as a natural athlete. Not by a long chalk. The man was a thinker. Well, there’s a place in this world for thinking, I certainly wouldn’t argue with that. The trouble with so much thinking, though, or with that which calls itself thinking, is that it’s like farting Annie Laurie down a keyhole.’
And in the central relationship (anti-relationship) of man and wife, Pinter cleverly contrasts the deliberately boorish behaviour of the aggressive petty bourgeois with the easy ability of the well bred upper middle class woman to rise above that sort of thing.
All this is beautifully done and often extremely funny. The problem for Pinter is that his style has become so much part of theatrical and satirical language. Thus when the brothers recite the names of those attending the meeting you are reminded of Rowan Atkinson or Monty Python. Pinter is the original, but he’s been imitated quite effectively. Sometimes too the language of class that Pinter mimics seems stuck in the 1960s.
A more serious flaw is that the ghostlike figure of the daughter, who introduces and rounds off the play, is too weak to justify the strength of the images Pinter puts in her mouth.
So Moonlight does not rank with the best of his work. But sharp writing and perceptive acting still produce a riveting performance.
Moonlight plays at the Almeida Theatre, London, until 30 October
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