God and monsters

The drop-curtain resembles a granite slab on which the genius’s name has been carved for all time. The festival of Pinter at the Harold Pinter Theatre feels like the inauguration of a godhead. And it’s not easy to separate the work from the reverence that surrounds it. Pinter One consists of sketches and playlets written in the period after 1980 when the author abandoned his anarchic underclass comedies and set about analysing power and its abuses. But his originality deserted him and he began to write like a student troll with a sadistic streak.

In Press Conference a newly appointed minister discusses murdering dissidents’ children by snapping their necks. In Precisely, two boozy establishment figures chat about bumping off 20 million citizens. The New World Order consists of a naked prisoner being mocked by a pair of nattily dressed bullies. Quite a charmless overture. Mountain Language is a famous short play inspired by Saddam Hussein’s treatment of the Kurds. The script looks at a minority ethnic group whose native tongue is being stamped out and we meet three victims in various states of distress. Pinter’s chaotic structure and his perfunctory characterisation make the drama hard to follow. And the visual brutality flirts with voyeurism. An unclothed convict, about whom we know nothing, is shown covered in blood, shaking pathetically, with his pants around his ankles. Another tableau involves a young widow offering herself as a sex toy to the irregulars who murdered her husband.

All these dispiriting vignettes fail for the same reason. They aren’t dramatic. Power rests with the thuggish despots while the downtrodden victims can never fight back or redeem themselves. Pinter, in his political phase, invariably portrayed the bad guys as English toffs. Was he suggesting that tyranny and genocide are native to the Home Counties and nowhere else on earth?

The scene shifts to Washington for The Pres and an Officer in which a clueless ex-alcoholic Jesus freak has taken over the White House.