Hilarity and Menace in Pinter’s The Hothouse
by CRAIG BALDWIN

It is with some envy that I meet with director Richard Feldman, to talk about his latest project with Juilliard’s fourth-year actors. Many reading this article will remember Richard’s speech at convocation this year. Some of you will remember his beautiful, haunting production of Frank McGuinness’s Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me with members of last year’s fourth-year class of actors. If you’re a student or alumnus of the Drama Division, you’ll know him as the first director you ever worked with at Juilliard, a great acting and text analysis teacher, advisor to students and faculty, and general friend to all.

Daniel Breaker (left) and Jason Van Over (right) rehearse a scene from Pinter’s The Hothouse with director Richard Feldman. (Photo by Jane Rubinsky)

This month, with half of the fourth-year acting class, Richard is embarking on a production of The Hothouse, Harold Pinter’s hilarious and eerie play about some kind of regimented mental institute, where the staff members are strangely violent and off-kilter. The reason I find myself meeting Richard with envy is that I happen to be in the other half of the class—the half not working on this show.

I begin by asking him about the difficulty of working with a writer renowned for the ambiguity and mystery in his work. As one London reviewer wrote, “Not understanding Harold Pinter has become one of the great pleasures of contemporary literature.”

Richard Feldman: He’s always been scary and daunting in his reputation… the pauses. It’s interesting, though, to find out how much of the work we already do still applies. You know, ‘what’s going on?’, ‘who are you?’, ‘what’s happening now?’, ‘what do you want?’.

Craig Baldwin: When I read the play, that really interested me, in terms of how I would approach it, acting-wise. Part of how Pinter seems to create suspense and menace in his writing is to leave out what’s actually motivating the characters—why they’re doing what they’re doing, or saying what they’re saying—but as an actor, that’s really what you work with: motivation.

R.F.: Right. Over the summer, I was looking at a long list of plays for the season, and my nephew happened to be in town. He’s 14. He read a bunch of plays, and when he got to The Hothouse, he just devoured it. He loved it. I said, ‘What do you like about it?’ and the first thing he said was, ‘I like that the author doesn’t explain what’s going on.’ He knew something was going on, but he loved that idea, that very idea that Pinter refuses to explain, or have the characters make a speech that explains, ‘this is who I am’ and ‘this is what I want.’ Pinter says, ‘there’s something alarming about the fact that so many characters on stage can and do, just that—verify who they are.’ Pinter is definitely working in a different way. He claims that he just starts with a situation that comes up in his head, or a line of dialogue, and he just follows that and he tries to listen and shape, listen and shape. He doesn’t always know what’s there, what the truth is, or always, why. It’s very exciting, because he’s working out of his creative unconscious. It’s not that he doesn’t shape and structure, because I think he’s brilliant at that, too.

C.B.: Yes, I read this amazing thing that Martin Esslin wrote in The People Wound, in 1970, about the way Pinter structures his writing:

Pinter’s dialogue is as tightly – perhaps more tightly – controlled than verse. Every syllable, every inflection, the succession of long and short sounds, words and sentences, is calculated to nicety. And precisely the repetitiousness, the discontinuity, the circularity of ordinary, vernacular speech are here used as formal elements with which the poet can compose his linguistic ballet.

Which I thought was an interesting point of view, because in my experience of hearing Pinter spoken, it sounds very natural, very much like casual speech. And yet it’s so carefully wrought.

R.F.: Yes, it is. You know, we do a lot of text analysis to get underneath the surface of the play. We ask why we’re saying or doing things, what we want. But really, text analysis also consists of looking at the surface of the text. What, for example, is the rhythm that is written on the page? We could miss it, and it’s right there in front of our faces. Sometimes just how the thing is written on the page is giving you lots of information. You know, you have to tackle both.

C.B.: And Hothouse struck me as a play with many levels to tackle. On one level it is hilarious, the funniest Pinter play that I have read. And then it’s also just as dark as the darkest of his plays.

R.F.: Yes, it’s got all the violence, and yet all the brilliant comic, almost vaudeville sketch, turns. I mean, there’s some classic old jokes in there.

Roote: What does she look like?
Pause.
Gibbs: Fattish.
Roote: Darkheaded?
Gibbs: Not fairheaded, sir.
Pause.
Roote: Small?
Gibbs: Certainly not tall.
Pause.
Roote: Quite a sensual sort of face?
Gibbs: Quite sensual, yes, sir.
Roote: Yes.
Pause.
Yes, she’s got a sensual sort of face, hasn’t she?
Gibbs: I should say it was sensual, sir, yes.
Roote: Wobbles when she walks?
Gibbs: Oh, possibly a trifle, sir.
Roote: Yes, she wobbles. She wobbles in her left buttock.
Gibbs: Her left, sir?
Roote: Well, one of them. I’m sure of it.
Gibbs: Yes, she has a slight wobble, sir.
Roote: Yes, of course she has.
Pause.
She’s got a slight wobble. Whenever she walks anywhere . . . she wobbles. Likes eating toffees, too . . . when she can get any.
Gibbs: Quite true, sir.
Pause.
Roote: No – I don’t think I know her.

That’s, like, from the Stone Age. But it’s still very funny. But this is also a very frightening and strange play. You feel like there’s always something lurking back there. We have to imagine most of this place, ‘The Hothouse,’ where the play is set. In fact, we only meet the staff, not the patients.

C.B.: And we only ever see four rooms of the whole building, right?

R.F.: Yes, it’s going to be our job to create a sense of the rest of this institution. There’s something below the ground, the floors above, what’s behind that door?

C.B.: And then there are these odd sounds that come from parts of the institution we don’t see.

R.F.: There are these odd sounds, yes, and what are they? I don’t think the characters on stage know what they are. You know, what’s that line from that Dylan song? “Somethin’s happenin’, but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?” There’s always that quality.

C.B.: Do you think Pinter is particularly condemning? I mean, he is a human rights activist as well as being a playwright. He was very vocal in his objections to NATO bombing in Serbia. Do you think he’s particularly condemning mental institutions, in The Hothouse?

R.F.: That’s interesting, you know, at different times in his career—I mean, he disavowed being political early in his career. You know, in interviews he said, ‘I’m not interested in politics. I’m not political.’ They asked all these famous writers, this is in the ’60s, about whether England should join the Common Market and he said, ‘I couldn’t care less about politics.’ But he’s political in the sense, I think, that he’s keenly aware of the sociological context in which we live, how were shaped and coerced by institutions. The struggle of the individual in the institution is something that speaks to him. You know, he was a conscientious objector, right after the Second World War. Spent a couple of weeks in jail, I think. Anyway, he just didn’t believe in it. He said in one interview, talking about when Stanley is carted away at the end of The Birthday Party, and Petey says to him, “Don’t let them tell you what to do.” He said those are the most important words that he’s written.

C.B.: And that concern, with the place of the individual within a large institution, seems very relevant in the United States right now. How this war against the institution that is the country we live in—how it will affect the individual.

R.F.: Right.

C.B.: The way he uses language also seems very relevant to our modern way of living. You know, Pinter’s characters don’t necessarily communicate anything clear with their language. It’s always so ambiguous. Which to me parallels the world we live in, where language has stopped being a clear way of communicating, because now we rely on images, so much, to communicate. At least on a mass level.

R.F.: Actually, he talks about how language is used, and he feels our problem is we communicate only too well. We’re revealing ourselves, all the time. So, actually language is often defensive. The more we speak up, the more it’s about covering up. Language is used defensively or aggressively, or to hide. And that’s a good place to start with his plays, as a director. There are certainly issues of subservience and dominance and the violence that comes out of that.

I was at a symposium on Pinter. And Henry Woolf, the actor and childhood friend of Pinter’s, was there. He was asked how much being Jewish had an effect on Pinter’s work, coming out of the Holocaust, growing up. He felt like there was none, directly. But he went on to say that he felt that, growing up, Pinter had come to learn the one lesson that all good Jewish boys know, which is: ‘The only safe place to live, really, is in your head.’ And he felt that many of Pinter’s plays take place in that psychic place. So in a sense, they are also very personal and psychological plays. You get the politics of the psyche as well as the psychological aspect of politics. If you think about a play like The Hothouse, it takes place entirely in this place. It’s this—we don’t know what it is. It’s an institution, a convalescent home, rest home, you know, rehabilitation home. But the patients have numbers here, not names. When I first read it, I thought, ‘Oh, it’s as if, somehow, Germany had won the war.’ You know, it’s the place, probably, where they take Stanley at the end of The Birthday Party, to be re-programmed, made fit for society. In The Caretaker, the character of Ashton talks about his experience in a hospital, with shock treatment. Anyway, it’s an image that’s resonant for Pinter.

He apparently, by the way, based part of the play on an incident that happened to him. He was trying to make some money. He went to a hospital where he was a subject in a scientific experiment where they sent loud, piercing sounds through earphones into his ears, like in The Hothouse. That actually happened to him. So, it does strike me as a personal play as well as being political satire.

C.B.: Well, it must give you confidence to tackle this play with a group of actors you have known and taught for the past four years.

R.F.: It’s great, actually. The first reading was very exciting, and I think we have a way of thinking about things and working together. Everybody seems to be in such good shape, and jumping in and being brave and bold, yet also curious and responsive. I can’t remember, ever, two plays opening the fourth-year season more strongly than Riff Raff and Landscape of the Body did last month. It’s great for me—I’ve really enjoyed working with your class again, after teaching and directing you in the first and second years. Usually I don’t get to see actors that much in third year, so there’s this long gap that something magical happens in. It’s nice for me to know that I can come into rehearsal, and it’s not going to be up to me to make something happen. I don’t have pump anybody up, or drag anyone through. There’s just a tremendous amount of creativity going on.

The Hothouse runs from November 15 to 19 at 8 p.m. (with a 2 p.m. matinee on November 17) in the Drama Theater on the fourth floor. Tickets are available from the Juilliard box office.

Craig Baldwin is a fourth-year actor who writes about drama for The Juilliard Journal. He played Durwood Peach in last month’s production of Landscape of the Body.