Pinter's Mirror by Harold Pinter

(Shakespeare & Company, Lenox, Mass.; Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre June 11-Aug 2;

198 seats; $12-$48 top)

 

By Chris Newbound

Photo by Kevin Sprague

 

A Shakespeare & Company presentation of three one acts.

 

Elizabeth Ingram . . . . . .Flora, Voice 2

Malcolm Ingram . . . . . . Edward, Voice 3, Controller

Stephen Pilkington . . . . Matchseller, Voice 1, Driver

 

 

While the first play of the evening, the overly long at an hour and change, A Slight Ache (1961), has all the Pinter trademarks—the celebration of language, the phrase or word repetition, humor, the violence (at one point Edward, expertly played by Malcolm Ingram, wields a cricket bat around, seemingly taking aim at the matchseller's head), and yes, uncomfortable pauses, both literal and metaphorical—the play is less precise and becomes stalled three quarters of the way through, relying on an almost pat, even predictable ending to see its way clear.

 

An upper middle-class couple, clearly bored with one another and their isolated, smug lives become jointly obsessed by the silent matchseller who lurks about their property, intriguing Flora (Elizabeth Ingram), the wife, and frightening Edward, an academic of some sort. The matchseller seems to be a combination of Dickens’s silent ghost of Christmas future, a blank slate on which to project one’s fears or, in the case of Flora, desires and fantasies, and Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener who would prefer not to. In this case, prefer not to talk at all.

 

His complete silence provokes long, rambling monologues from both husband and wife that are comic and unsettling as the mood of the play shifts back and forth from the comedic to the serious. But the play seems to go round and round after awhile, neither progressing or amplifying its themes despite how deftly and realistically played it is by both Elizabeth and Malcolm Ingram upon a minimalist set by Kiki Smith.

 

After an intermission, things pick up considerably with Family Voices (1981). While on the surface the play may be nothing more, really, than overlapping monologues in the form of letters (written between a son, mother, and father who, unknowing to the son, has recently passed away from unexplained causes), in fact, the writing and acting is so skilled that such monologues are anything but static.

 

Stephen Pilkington as the son (or Voice 1) manages to strike an almost perfect note of innocence, intelligence, and humor, using all acting tools at his disposal including movement as he wanders around the stage recounting his amusing and occasionally surreal adventures at what we gather is a boarding house in a large city, deftly inhabiting other characters and their voices in order to tell his tales.

 

The mother’s letters go from the sweet and genial to angry, “I pray that your life is a torment to you,” after not hearing from the son—one of the unexplained aspects of the play is that none of the letters seem to be reaching their recipients.

 

Malcolm Ingram, utterly transformed from the first play, mostly lies in a recliner, wearing black Ray- Bans and looking something like Huey Lewis, from the ’80s rock band Huey Lewis and the News, finally uttering to his son, “An old hello from the dark.” And then later, “I have lots to say to you, but it will go unsaid because I’m dead.” This is Pinter at his best, both chilling and comic and terribly sad all at the same time.