Pinter a kind of alaska download pdf

Reflecting on the cultural, personal, sociological, and philosophical contexts of these diverse critical perspectives and the critics who express them, this book is equally about the act or the art of literary criticism and itself an important work of literary criticism.

Drawing on interviews with Pinter scholars, Susan Hollis Merritt shows how critics "play" with Pinter and thereby seriously enforce personal, professional, and political affiliations. Cutting across traditional academic and nonacademic boundaries, Merritt argues that greater cooperation and collaboration among critics can resolve conflicts, promote greater social equity, and foster ameliorative critical and cultural change. The second volume of Harold Pinter's collected work includes The Caretaker.

The Caretaker It was with this play that Harold Pinter had his first major success. The obsessive caretaker, Davies, is a classic comic creation, and his uneasy relationship with the enigmatic Aston and Mick a landmark in twentieth-century drama. However, the third play, 'A Kind of Alaska, ' which strikes me on instant acquaintance as a masterpiece moves one in a way no work of his has ever done before Never before have I Known a Pinter play to leave one so emotionally wrung through.

It has taken some of us time to learn Pinter's language. He was never less obscure than here, or more profoundly eloquent about the fragile joy of being alive. The one-act play stands apart as a distinct art form with some well known writers providing specialist material, among them Bernard Shaw, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill.

There are also lesser-known writers with plenty of material to offer, yet sourcing one-act plays to perform is notoriously hard. This companion is the first book to survey the work of over playwrights in an illuminating A-Z guide. Multiple styles, nationalities and periods are covered, offering a treasure trove of compelling moments of theatre waiting to be discovered. Guidance on performing and staging one-act plays is also covered as well as essential contact information and where to apply for performance rights.

A chapter introducing the history of the one-act play rounds off the title as a definitive guide. In addition, the imaginary scope of Chekhov's work opened up the actors' creative investigation beyond the confines of each play.

In the words of one of the student actors Zoe Dods : It helped me understand the possibilities of the exercises. I didn't have to just stay within the realms of the text I could just explore whatever I wanted to do with my character. This perceived freedom with the text is a notable consequence of the unfettered imaginary work, which Chekhov encourages. Chekhov himself was criticised for taking his work beyond the playwright's intentions, specifically when working on Boleslavski's production of the Wreck ofthe Good Hope According to Mel Gordon: The idea that an actor can 'go beyond the playwright or the play' is the first key to understanding the Chekhov technique and how it differed from Stanislavsky's early teachings.

Chekhov claimed that the impulse 'to go beyond' came to him during his earlier apprenticeship at the Maly Theatre [in ]. Chekhov , xii Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 28 July Although we returned to the very specific demands of Pinter's language in the rehearsals on text, the forays beyond the play in the workshops had a striking impact on the actor's creative confidence.

In the first instance this was evident in debates in the rehearsal room over character motivation. These debates were informed by imaginative decisions made by the cast in the workshops and, as such, seemed to carry more weight for the actor during text work. More specifically, the explorations beyond the text, focusing as they did on work with imaginative objects, began to develop the actors' facility with real objects in rehearsal and performance - an area that can be a weakness in student work.

The following exercise began the intensive vacation course: Object work: Think of an object you know, recreate it in all its detail, then think of an object your character knows: imagine a long corridor, at the end of it is your character's room, enter into the room, pick up one object and then discard it, pick up a second, develop a dialogue with it, select some text. Respond to the object as it becomes cold. This exercise resulted in an elaborate and complex web of given circumstances being created by the actors.

The Sergeant in Mountain Language played by Stacey Swift 'found' a knife in the room, previously owned by the character's father not referred to in the text and used 'to hurt people'. A real knife was then introduced into the scene in rehearsal, and was used in the innocent action of peeling an apple. In turn, the knife became superfluous and was dropped from the scene but the apple was retained, the eating of which became imbued with the same quality of menace and violence discovered in the workshop experience.

In Stacey's own words: 'The object of the apple, because it had been born from my imagination, had a hyperreal quality for me. For Chekhov, clarification of the former is part of the director's work whilst the latter falls within the remit of the actor. We began this process by setting up the studio space carefully, including what we called a 'special' space surrounded by a perimeter of'safe' space. Initial exercises concentrated on the threshold between the two spaces: at first by asking the actors to imagine crossing between the two spaces and then directing them to enter Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 28 July physically into the special objective space before returning to the safe space.

A sense of'transition' between the two spaces was thus developed. This perimeter of safety is significant and serves a number of functions. It is there if an actor loses concentration, corpses or fmds the experience overwhelming and allows an immediate psychological distance from the imaginary work on stage to be established.

As the central area is a space of imaginary ideas, withdrawing from that space is also a withdrawal from the ideas and feelings generated by the imagination: a safety valve which Chekhov thought was missing from the personal work demanded by Stanislavski. Having established the objective space, we offered suggestions for atmospheres which filled this space: at first directly from our Chekhov training - the Gothic cathedral - then keyed in to our own concerns as directors of the Pinter plays.

The latter set of atmospheres was wide ranging - from the emotional boredom, tranquil love, hopelessness to the material marble, ice , and was chosen to resonate with both plays. The cast was invited simply to enter into the space, feel the atmosphere, respond in some manner, and exit. This process began without any structure, with individual actors following their own impulses to enter the space. Gradually, though, the improvisations were more carefully controlled, with the workshop leader asking particular pairings drawn from the plays to enter the space with an awareness of each other.

Later still, brief improvisations in twos and threes grouped from the plays were played through with each actor using a small piece of their character's text. Atmospheres were also suggested by music, relying on the actors' imaginations to fill the space. JChai o- 2. They also suggested a thematic pattern in the two plays - the move from an Alaskan chill inA Kind ofAlaska to a dark, torturous heat in Mountain Language. Having experimented with the music pieces separately, we split the space in two, dedicating each half to one piece of music now retained in the memory and asked the actors to explore the transitions from one space to the other.

No two objective atmospheres can exist in the same space, according to Chekhov; the overall atmosphere will always change to accommodate a new character or set of circumstances. By splitting the objective space into two, the actors are asked to explore repeatedly those moments of transition- what might be a new entrance or a new scene in a play.

Split into two, the space models the shape of a play moving Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 28 July from one atmosphere to another. Developing a sensitivity to these atmospheric shifts is central to Chekhov's creative method and for our purposes essential for the scoring process we were to adopt. Finally, the cast was asked to decide upon an individual atmosphere for a particular moment in the play. It transpired that these atmospheres were also of varying kinds and emerged from previous rehearsals as well as from predominant imagery from the text.

Noting down the choices of the cast, they varied from simple emotional, Boredom, to the more complex emotional, Awkward Nai"vete, to the simple material Marble and complex material, Bruising. We then experimented with the clash of objective space and individual atmospheres, improvising meetings between characters in the space.

Again, the space was later separated into two to explore how the individual atmospheres of each character transformed when moving from one objective atmosphere to another. Only when we had thoroughly explored both parts of the atmosphere work did we take the step of scoring the plays in objective atmospheres.

We took our lead from the instruction by Chekhov in the chapter on Objective Atmosphere and Individual Feelings in On the Technique ofActing: The director can organize the rehearsal period of a production so that different Atmospheres within a play will be investigated, decided upon, and rehearsed as exactly as the dialogue or mise-en-scene.

The script can be marked with a succession of Atmospheres. The division of the play into scenes and acts need have no connection with the division of the play into Atmospheres. These can be freely distributed to cover several speeches or an entire scene, or only part of it, according to the interpretation of the play.

For the final rehearsal period we developed a prompt book which defined the atmospheric shifts as clearly as the change in lighting states.

The specific atmospheres chosen for the score had been suggested to us by the workshop investigations and then organised by us to make conscious links between the plays. The cast was then asked to make their own decisions concerning their Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 28 July individual atmospheres in response to the objective score.

The fruits of this process are discussed below in two sections devoted to each play in turn. Sacks' sensitive documentation of patients suffering from encephalitis lethargica - or sleeping sickness - has inspired many creative responses, from short stories, to novels and poems as well as a Hollywood fllin starring Robert de Niro and Robin Williams. The fllin version follows a rather predictable line of romance - an idealised struggle against the odds, documenting Leonard L.

Pinter's play, by contrast, explores the stark reality of a Doctor's obsession with the illness, the subsequent tensions placed on his marriage with Pauline and the confused world of his patient, Deborah, who has, in Pinter's words, 'erupted into life once more' , after twenty nine years of frozen 'sleep'. Deborah is very clearly based on Sacks' patient Rose R: 'the youngest child of a large, wealthy, talented New York family.

One might read Pinter's play as a dramatic response to Sacks' rhetorical question in Awakenings: 'Is it possible that Miss R has never, in fact, moved on from the 'past'1 Could she still be 'in' forty-three years lated Is 'now'1' Sacks , It is a typically Pinteresque conundrum reminiscent of the sort of temporal complexity seen in Old Times when, with Anna's first entrance, Pinter fuses past with present effortlessly.

The time frame of the play offers a particular range of difficulties for a director, firstly in casting the play, then in setting the dramatic context for the actors. Sacks' patient had slept for forty-three years before her revival at the age of sixty- four, Pinter's, as we have seen, sleeps for twenty-nine years. Rose R. Deborah is caught in adolescence at sixteen. Our casting of A Kind ofAlaska reversed the acting problem for the actress playing Deborah - Zoe Dods, aged 20 -for she was physically stuck in the youth of her character and had to make the mental leap into old age, rather than vice versa.

This became a point to emphasise in her interaction with the middle-aged doctor, Hornby, played by my colleague, Anthony Shrubsall Following Chekhov's approach, the shifting pattern of relationships between the two main characters was scored in atmospheric terms.

Thus, the opening section of the performance, before the first piece of dialogue, was performed in an objective atmosphere of Romance Fig. The space into which they entered was a gauze tent which absorbed colour very effectively and thus could act as a visual transformer of atmosphere against the imaginative shifts of mood detailed in the score.

The significance of this design will be discussed later. Here, though, let us note that from the outset the objective atmosphere was designed to problematise the doctor-patient relationship. Hornby's and Deborah's opening image was deliberately redolent of early Hollywood classics starring Rudolph Valentino? The opening atmosphere was then sharply transformed. As Hornby methodically pumped up the hydraulic hospital bed a theatrical analogue of the administering ofL. Dopa by injection , the atmosphere shifted to one of Expectation.

At the same time the lighting transformed from a warm wash of pink to bright white. Accordingly, the relationship between the two characters changed to the orthodox set-up of doctor and patient. For the performers, the shift in atmosphere helped clarify the newly established environment of the hospital ward whilst also demanding an individual response from them. Both actors were invited to determine a personal score of individual atmospheres.

Expectation pervaded in general but the two characters' responses to this objective atmosphere were very different. These individual feelings complemented the status shift: from the equality of lovers to the imbalanced doctor-patient relationship as Hornby assumes control in the clinical environment. Hornby's reaction to Expectation was coloured by his professional concerns as the carer and this was reflected in his instinctive note making during her awakening. Deborah's naive response to Expectation, by contrast, resulted in her radiating a sense of hope, tinged with uncertainty.

These choices helped clarifY for the actors what lay behind the ambiguous statement with which Deborah opens the play - for Hornby, a whole new case study presents itself, for Deborah, there is a tentative recognition that her mental incarceration is over. Silence Do you recognise me?

Silence Can you hear me? She does not look at him , As a director, the explicit scoring of the text in such a way made clear a range of other performance issues beyond atmosphere. Questions of rhythm, gesture, movement and character motivation became focused once the atmospheric context of the work had been established. This is not to say all these questions were solved by this method, but that the exercise of deciding upon the pattern ofobjective atmospheres for the whole of Pinter's play closed down the near infinite range of possibilities with which a director is faced at the beginning of a project and suggested fruitful ways forward.

This was particularly clear when working on the latter part of the play with the whole cast of three. Pauline's entrance and her reunion with her sister, in the last third of the play, eschews any sentimentality, highlighting instead the problems of relative-patient relationships.

Not only does she remain unrecognised by Deborah: 'she must be an aunt I've never met' , but her husband is clearly critical of what he considers to be her premature entrance into the ward. To capture this highly dramatic charge we chose the atmosphere of Competition for Pauline's entrance, and having done so the complex physical and psychological dynamic between the three characters at this crucial moment in the play was brought into focus.

Pauline regards him Well, alright. Speak to her. Pauline: What shall I say? Hornby: Just talk to her. Pauline: Doesn't it matter what I say? Hornby: No. Pauline: Shall I tell her lies or the truth? Hornby: Both. Pauline's silent stare speaks volumes to the tensions in her marriage. Kept out of the way and uninformed by Hornby, while her sister comes back to life after thirty years, she is entitled to be upset. The directorial challenge is to find a way of communicating this frisson to an audience without reducing the richness of the moment.

Scoring this moment in the objective atmosphere of Competition not only marked the important change in mood felt when someone else enters the room but also suggested a complete physical pattern for the scene. Deborah became an object of desire for both Hornby and Pauline - although, again, the nature of the desire was determined by the individual atmosphere chosen by the actors. In territorial terms, Pauline commandeered her husband's desk space SL , displacing him to the bed SR , thus establishing her own relationship with Deborah who remained seated at the desk , whilst ensuring the previous atmosphere of Intimacy, shared between doctor and patient, was completely eradicated.

Later Deborah moved back to the bed with Hornby, the action being interpreted by the doctor as a victory. In motivational terms, the atmosphere of Competition served to offer a clear explanation for Pauline's aberrant line: 'I am a widow' As a younger sister, her relationship with Deborah, would naturally have been competitive. Seeing her husband so deeply engaged in Deborah's nostalgic narratives as to lose sight of her pain is a sign of the emotional distance between them.

Hornby says as much in his speech minutes later: Your sister Pauline was twelve when you were left for dead.

When she was twenty I married her. She is a widow. I have lived with you. It is a speech dominated by categoric statements of fact, arguably given to the doctor by Pinter to lend them a professional weight: I have been your doctor for many years. This is your sister. Your father is blind.

Estelle looks after him. She never married. Your mother is dead. This is contrasted with Pauline's sensitivity and her deeper understanding of the pain Deborah has experienced. She is not concerned with getting the facts straight. Will I have a birthday party? You will. You will have a birthday. And everyone will be there. All you family will be there. All your old friends. And we'll have presents for you. All wrapped up The first atmosphere lent itself to the clinical delivery of Hornby's speech and excluded Pauline from the proceedings.

The second re-established a historical connection between Deborah and Pauline and excluded Hornby. Shifting from the lecture hall to the birthday party, brought Pauline into the action and marked a transition from the self-justification ofHornby to the selfless attitude of his wife. Again, the change in atmosphere initiated a change in the physical arrangement of the scene with Hornby being forced once more to retreat as Pauline took on the atmosphere of the birthday party, positioning herself at the end of the bed, evoking a sense of the excitement children have on the morning of a birthday.

Here, though, the status of the two sisters was reversed with Pauline taking the older role, effectively mothering Deborah. Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 28 July The production concluded by reversing the imagery of the opening; Hornby letting the bed down on its hydraulic as Deborah is consigned to sleep again.

A vase of flowers was lit in a chilling steel blue to further sign her retreat into Alaska and Pauline and Hornby were frozen in speechless incomprehension overlooking the hospital bed. The image consciously foreshadowed the motif of stasis in Mountain Language and concluded an imagistic through-line of immobility begun before the play had even started, outside the studio.

As a prologue to the performance we staged a dumb show inspired by the photograph of Seymour L. Hunched over a radiator and framed by a similariy threatening corridor, Zoe opened the proceedings as Deborah 'exercising' in the hospital. The image was designed to make a virtue of the institutional austerity of Avenue campus as well as suggest a before-time for the play. Her physical shape bent double and stretching forward with the right arm was then echoed in the production; firstly, by Hornby as he described his patient's care during her 'sleep' ; and secondly, by Deborah herself as she recalled the moment she froze as a sixteen year old, clutching a vase and looking, as Pauline says, 'like Picking up on this image, we agreed on the objective atmosphere of Marble for Pauline's longest speech in the play, spoken as Deborah returns to her own position of stasis in the bed.

Here, Pauline is given the task of relating to Deborah the actual events surrounding the moment she had frozen in statuesque paralysis: Mummy was laughing and even Estelle was laughing and then we suddenly looked at you and you had stopped.

You were standing with the vase by the sidetable, you were about to put it down, your arm was stretched towards it but you had stopped. Marble suggested a progressively slow rhythm for the speech as if she herself was becoming frozen. All plays and sketches are in chronological order.

The Room Old Times The Birthday Party Monologue The Dumb Waiter No Man's Land A Slight Ache Betrayal The Hothouse Family Voices The Caretaker Other Places A Night Out