Harold Pinter’s “The Dwarfs”: Drama in the Line

The Dwarfs, by Harold Pinter

White Bear Theatre, London SE11, until June 5.

Harold Pinter (1930-2008) had much in common with William Shakespeare (1564-1616), not least that they were both actors-cum-playwrights. John Gielgud, at the end of a long and renowned acting career, remarked that he just knew that the man who wrote Shakespeare’s plays was an actor: every line is subtly full of drama. Soon after Peter Hall founded the Royal Shakespeare Company, he found that Pinter was his “Eureka” playwright, the modernist whose plays were ideal for his young company in giving them, in their way of depending on rhythm, phrasing, and diction: the R.S.C. went on to give many of the world premieres of Pinter’s plays, with Hall directing.

These points return to the mind when watching the new production of Pinter’s The Dwarfs at the White Bear Theatre, Kennington. More ideally than any other Pinter staging I’ve seen since Pinter’s death, on either side of the Atlantic, it embodies Pinter style: suspenseful, keenly rhythmic, subtly nervous, both cleverly witty and freshly plainspoken, juggling tragedy and comedy, absurdism and psychodrama. With its audience seated in banked rows on two sides of the stage, it moves through a rapid succession of different scenes, with duets, trios, quartets, and soliloquies all propelling us through painful young-adult adventures. Diction is natural but lucid; phrasing and timing are taut; innumerable subtexts emerged from both what is being left unsaid and how the characters are speaking.

This should not surprise. The director, Harry Burton, has been steeped in Pinter for over thirty years. He acted in the world premiere of Pinter’s Party Time (1991) as co-actor; he knew Pinter as a friend and colleague; he directed Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter in 2007 with Pinter as his consultant.

The Dwarfs is a novel that Pinter wrote in the 1950s, early in his career. Only in 1992 did he publish it; but in 1960 he had adapted it into a play for the radio, a play he then brought to the stage. Both 1960 play and 1992 novel are about the tense interplay between three male characters - structurally like all the male triangle of another Pinter play of 1960 The Caretaker. But the novel also places importance on one woman, Virginia, who Pinter omitted from his 1960 theatrical adaptation. In 2002, Kerry Lee Crabbe, with the assistance of the director Christopher Morahan and Pinter himself, wrote a new play of The Dwarfs, including Virginia as well as the three men: Mark, Len, and Pete. It’s this that Burton has staged at the White Bear.

I remember Hall saying near the end of Pinter’s life that all Pinter’s plays were based on the idea of the Cockney piss-take, the device of trying to fool one or more other people by saying something wholly insincere as if to persuade. This kind of London male playfulness, related to both male bonding and male competition, pervades all the men’s conversations here; they’re always performing.

Pete, Mark, and Len are young men, full of bravado and vulnerability. Conversation moves seamlessly and with bewildering rapidity between philosophy and craziness, literature and life, sex and values. Much is at stake. Yet at one level, they’re all also play-acting in their efforts to entertain and impress one another, even bully one another: Charlie MacGechan (Mark), Ossian Perret (Len), Joseph Potter (Pete) all catch this and other elements to perfection.

Virginia’s presence changes everything for them, just as Ruth does to the all-male household of Pinter’s play The Homecoming, and just as the four French court ladies do to the four gentlemen of the court of Navarre in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. She’s an item with Pete for much of the play; but, after he goes too far in his rage and rudeness (on one occasion berating her for speaking about Shakespeare), she leaves him.

As Denise Laniyan shows in her performance, Virginia is as intelligent, eloquent, and witty as the chaps, but she doesn’t go in for their competitive power play or their absurdism. She isn’t deeper or finer or stronger than them, but she doesn’t play their endless games: she takes nobody’s piss. And her simple capacity for directness and openness, for showing the difference between wisdom and mere wit, adds a wonderful moral power to her scenes.

Yet she’s light, gentle, subversive, wry. There has been attraction between Mark and herself; she’s calm in the way she now allows this to take its course. “You might as well make the most of me,” she says, “because I’ll only last about a week.” It’s a terrific line, spoken by Laniyan with marvellously soft casualness: with those words, Virginia subverts conventional morality and tosses away her own power. The only thing Laniyan lacks is crisp consonants: her words don’t arrive with the clean edge that Pinter’s finest actors and actresses have had.

Gradually, The Dwarfs shows us that both Len and Pete have a borderline grip on sanity. Pinter’s most underrated quality is his compassion: he understands, very touchingly, what each of these two difficult men are like in their heads when alone. Len’s pathos is more open; coping with a frighteningly precarious view of life, he’s endearing as he tries to make sense of a world that contains too much nonsense. Ossian Perret plays him with a wonderful innocence, an intelligent sweetness.

The sense of competition between Pete and Mark is more intense. Pete, in particular, senses Mark as a threat in intellectual and sexual terms; he, Pete, has one solo scene in which anxiety rises to the pitch of madness and seems to drive him to suicide - though we soon realise that his desperate fall is not one that ends in death. Joseph Potter catches all Pete’s tough surfaces and painful insecurities: even though he makes clear how often Pete is putting on a show, he also gives us the mind that panics, the heart that beats.

The role of Mark is the one most like Pinter himself, as Michael Billington establishes in his definitive biography. Mark enters into all the male games, but they’re not matters of life and death to him, though he feels and expresses rage and disillusion. He often watches the others, can hold his silence, wait his turn. Charlie MacGechan plays Mark with a wonderful steadiness. In one brief scene, away from the other two, he simply watches Virginia; the quality of his gaze has both naivety and volume.

Larger than any of these characters is their need of language, of simple words containing complex thought. At one point, Pete tells Len, “Look at a nutcracker . You press the cracker and the cracker cracks the nut. You might think that’s an exact process. It’s not. The nut cracks, but the hinge of the cracker gives out a fraction which is completely incidental to the particular idea. It’s unnecessary, an escape and wastage of energy to no purpose. So there’s nothing efficient about a nutcracker.”

Nutcrackers and cracking nuts are irrelevant to the rest of the play, so what’s being said here? Pete’s making an absolutely clear scientific point about energy - but why’s he saying it now? His assertiveness is as unnecessary as the nutcracker he’s describing. Pete seems so lucid, so firm, so bright; it takes ages before we see how much he’s composed of bluster and swagger.

At the end of the play, by contrast, Len describes his solitude in terms that are part delusion. But his ideas, unlike Pete’s, can change. Having described the filth in the yard in vivid and anxious detail, he suddenly calms: “Now all is bare. All is clean. All is scrubbed. There is a lawn. There is a shrub. There is a flower.” Whether or not Len’s describing reality or fantasy, we can’t miss how his thoughts have turned to hope and to faith.

The play ends on that affecting note, on those words. Or does it? Inevitably with Pinter, part of our minds stay with what’s unsaid and unseen, with Pete and Mark offstage, with the storms that have passed between them. The Dwarfs has layer upon layer, poignancy upon poignancy. Under the attractiveness and loyalties and brightness of its three young men are wells of sensitivity and fear.

It also has ingredients that prefigure situations in several later Pinter plays. You can also read in Billington’s Pinter biography how many of its details and of the later plays comes from Pinter’s own life. I could feel echoes of The Caretaker, The Homecoming, Old Times, No Man’s Land, and more. No matter. The Dwarfs creates its own world. Its laughs and terrors and intimacies are the stuff of young adult life, scarcely out of adolescence. Burton’s production makes them ours too.

@Alastair Macaulay 2022

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