Pinter’s pauses leave no time to relax
PREVIEW
What: The Caretaker Where: Roxy Theatre When: Opens 8 p.m. tonight, continues to May 7 Tickets: $20 to $47 (bluebridgetheatre.ca or 250-382-3370)
Playwright Harold Pinter was famous — indeed, even infamous — for his pauses.
There are hundreds in his plays, all scrupulously indicated as stage directions. The Homecoming has 224; Betrayal has 140. And The Caretaker — now being revived by the Blue Bridge Repertory Theatre — has 149.
Jacob Richmond, who is directing The Caretaker, has strong ideas about what he calls “the legendary Pinter pause.”
His cast — R.J. Peters, Lindsay Robinson and Paul Fauteux — will honour each and every one. However, Richmond has cautioned the actors not to make the pauses arbitrary or lifeless. The audience must sense there’s something taking place during these nonverbal mini-interludes.
“We discussed what’s happening in those moments. How did that person get from that thought to that thought?” Richmond said during a rehearsal break at the Roxy Theatre.
“We’ve had two-hour discussions about one single moment [of not speaking], about what’s going on in each of these characters’ brains.” Pinter, who won the Nobel Prize and died in 2008, was a towering figure in 20th-century British drama. He was renowned for his “comedy of menace,” in which characters — through mundane and often cryptic dialogue — typically struggle for power or seek to protect themselves.
The Caretaker is about a man, Aston, who invites a tramp named Davies to stay at his rundown flat. Davies later gets into an altercation with Aston’s brother Mick, who teases the vagrant by asking who his banker is.
At one point, the three scuffle over a bag of belongings that Aston brought Davies. The scene is a homage to a vaudevillian hat routine in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, one of Pinter’s heroes (Richmond directed Blue Bridge’s production of Waiting for Godot in 2015).
Richmond said there is a difference between the pauses and the silences (the latter are also indicated as stage directions) in Pinter’s plays.
“A pause is usually them searching for something to say. A silence is absolute resignation,” he said.
Pinter has a reputation as a serious absurdist playwright. Yet Richmond (himself a playwright known for his quirky black humour in such works as Legoland and Ride the Cyclone) said Pinter’s plays are amusing as well.
“They’re screamingly funny. One person will go from talking about a bus route to immediately attacking another person, [saying] ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ ” he said.
“When you have the first reading of these plays, people go: ‘I don’t get it. It just seems punishing.’ Then when you actually stage it, they go: ‘Wow, it’s really funny.’ ”
Richmond first saw The Caretaker when he was in his midteens. He attended a production at the University of Toronto staged by three plumbers who were amateur actors.
“These three plumbers just loved Pinter. They’d been working on it for, like, four years. They were fantastic. We were totally like fan-boys after.”
Richmond had come across Pinter’s plays shortly before this. He was impressed by a book featuring the so-called “angry young men” generation of working- and middle-class playwrights in Britain. As well as Pinter, they include John Osborne, who coined the term with his play Look Back in Anger.
Richmond was interviewed the day after learning that Ride the Cyclone, which recently had an off-Broadway run, is nominated for a prestigious Drama League Award. The New York Times cited the offbeat musical about teenagers who die in a freak roller-coaster accident as one of the best shows of 2016.
The Belfry Theatre has commissioned Richmond and his Ride the Cyclone partner, composer Brooke Maxwell, to create a new musical. However, the demands of working on Ride the Cyclone every time a new production comes up (the musical will be staged by Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre next year) has slowed progress on new ventures, Richmond said.
“It’ll be right at that moment when you’re ready to start, and then it’ll be OK, go ahead and do Cyclone,” he said.