sunday, bloody sunday (2)
by Douglas Messerli
Vladimir Shcherban (adaptor and
director) Being Harold Pinter,
Belarus Free Theatre / New York, La MaMa Ellen Stewart Theatre / the
performance I saw was the evening of May 8th, 2011
The moment I left the production of Jerusalem, I caught a taxi downtown to
the East 4th Street La MaMa theatre. I was looking forward to seeing the highly
respected Belarus Free Theatre's Being
Harold Pinter, in part because I am a great admirer of Pinter, but also
because I feel a great sympathy with a theater company that speaks out about
political issues, a company who currently cannot return to its homeland.
This production, which begins by speaking of Pinter's method of creating
characters, uses the playwright—himself an increasingly politicized figure as
he aged—as a kind of lightning rod with whom and against whom they play out
their various notions of what makes theater political, or, in their eyes,
something of value.
They begin with the openness with which Pinter creates his figures,
first setting them off from each other as alphabetical numbers which, as they
react to one other, grow ultimately into full-grown characters. The company is
intent, it appears, upon revealing the domestic violence of Pinter's figures,
displaying their relationships and language alongside their own renditions of
absurd prison interviews and punishments by officials and guards.
Anyone who knows Pinter's plays well, along with his later critical
writings and his Nobel Price acceptance speech, will realize that this
playwright is a political figure, and his plays, while sometimes moving into
more and more abstract territory, became increasingly insistent about the
nature of human torture and suffering. Using scenes from "Mountain
Language," "One for the Road," and "Ashes to Ashes,"
the group helps the audience to perceive just how similar and, yet, how
different Pinter is from the company's own presentation of Abu Ghraib-like
stories of life in Belarus prisons. "Ashes to Ashes," in particular,
points up Pinter's use of a dialogue between a jealous lover and a woman who is
haunted by torturous memories that may never have happened.
Yet there is a sense among these actors, also, that what they love in
Pinter is something they will rarely be able to reach, for they are out to
present political realities, no matter how absurd the situations may be, while
Pinter is far more interested in human relationships for good or bad. His
characters often seem to torture one another less for what they see as mistaken
ideas and actions as they do for the simple joy of it.
Particularly when these Belarusians performed scenes from Pinter's
earlier play, The Homecoming, the
group somehow got it all wrong. Yes, as they point out, the play begins with a
hostile conversation between a father and a son, but the heavily brooding
way in which they performed it is not, thank heaven, a standard reading. Often
behind the hate expressed in Pinter's interrelations is an enormous amount of
wit, a dark humor which cloaks and confuses the meaning, allowing us to see new
aspects of each character's personality. In Pinter there is no simple good or
bad. We may be morally disgusted by
The Belarus free theater performers—Nikolai Khalezin, Pavel Gorodnitski,
Yana Rusakevich, Oleg Sidorchik, Irina Yarshevich, Denis Tarasenka, and Marina
Yurevich—are all very serious minded, which, given the difficulty of their
artistic lives, is completely understandable. But Pinter, even as they admit,
is not truly what their theater is all about. The prison scenes they play out
may be equally absurd, the characters using language as a torturous device to
break down the individual will, but there is little wit and joy behind it, and
we recognize in that difference why political theater is often so predictable.
The company was brilliant in its performances of those political scenes, and
the substance of their criticism truly moved me. But then I have seen that play
over and over again in the pages of newspapers and books of history, whereas
each time I have seen a play by Harold Pinter it is as if I am discovering it
for the first time.
Los Angeles, June 6, 2011
Reprinted from USTheater,
Opera, and Performance (June 2011).