03.10.1996

Drowning world

Helen Ellis reviews Ashes to ashes by Harold Pinter (Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, at the Ambassadors, West Street, London)

Opinion has always been divided on the playwright Harold Pinter. Is he a lesser modern-day Beckett or does he create a poetry fuelled by tension and the exaggerated rhythms of everyday conversation to uncover the horror lurking below the everyday?

Ashes to ashes, Pinter’s new play, certainly stands in the latter category. From the very beginning the pace and power of the dialogue, together with the fascination of the escalating story of violence and terror, hold the audience spellbound.

The two actors, Lindsay Duncan and Stephen Rea, carry the poetry of the language as the most natural and at the same time tragic and anguished conversation.

Rebecca, played by Lindsay Duncan, opens the play by giving a matter-of-fact snapshot description of the physical and mental torture in a past relationship with an undisclosed lover. Her present partner, Devlin, demands a definition of this lover, demands expansion and explanation, but the life story that Rebecca describes only escalates in its horror and eludes definition, eludes understanding.

Her story slips between dream and reality in her remembrance and in the events themselves, as images disappear into quicksand or are enveloped by the sea.

At first the slipping away in her dialogue is trivial and irritating, though full of pathos and humour. Yet soon she slips away into the full terror of her story. This time, when she says there was “something I meant to tell you”, she has moved from being a witness to the protagonist in a nightmare that seems beyond definition and beyond feeling.

The sharply deadened language at the end of the play fills you with the hollowness that Devlin fears in a world without a god, without meaning, leaving only a vacuum. For Rebecca has told us that she has never suffered. She speaks of the “expanding gravy” that we create for ourselves to drown and desensitise a world that should be filled with stimulus.

When Rebecca tells of how she hands over her bundle of living compassion to the dictator figure at the railway station and perhaps object of her afflicted desire, a myriad of contemporary themes are invoked. Critics have said it is about Bosnia, nazism, Kurdistan. You could take almost anything in the experience of contemporary life, as Pinter does. He moves from the immediate to the distant, from the common to the fantastic, constantly changing those terms of reference as a starting point for this exploration of an inability to comprehend a drowning world.

Helen Ellis