Liz and Harry Boardmore, former members of CBU’s English Department, initiated the Play Festival. In marking the 40th anniversary of the festival with these lectures I am conscious of celebrating Liz and Harry’s achievement as much as the festival itself.
Liz died 6 years ago. Harry is over 80, ailing, and being cared for by a relative thousands of miles from here. As Liz and Harry’s physical lives recede into memory, what they created is reborn each year as a new generation of actors takes to the Boardmore stage.
When my wife and I arrived in Sydney in the mid-70s we were lassoed by Liz to be festival judges, and I also agreed with much trepidation to adjudicate some of the plays. Our connection to the theatre has been a deeply enriching experience. I’m honoured to be giving one of four lectures to help celebrate the
Festival’s 40 th anniversary. My mandate is to speak about an aspect of the Festival’s early history.
Liz and Harry brought to CBU and to Cape Breton plays that challenged conventional wisdom, exposed raw emotions, and raised questions about human existence. Many students and theatre goers saw for the first time plays by Beckett, Sartre, Sam Shepherd, Henry Miller, Edward Albee, and Harold Pinter.
The plays of Harold Pinter have appeared on CBU’s stage more often than those of any other playwright apart from Shakespeare. Harry Boardmore directed Pinter’s The Collection in the second festival season in 1967. Twelve other Pinter plays have appeared since then. When John Lingard came to teach English Literature at CBU, he brought with him a love and sensibility for Pinter, and, through his acting and directing, he has helped to continue the Pinter tradition in the festival. It is fitting, therefore, that today’s talk marking the Festival’s early history should focus on Harold Pinter.
My talk explores a central theme in Pinter’s plays: the obscenity of power and its connection to the male psyche. Pinter asks why it is mainly men who abuse power, especially when the abuse is violent. Why is it primarily men who declare war, who torture, and rape? Each of the three scenes we are about to see explores a different aspect of the obscenity of power: bureaucratic power, sexual power, and political power. We will see in each case the way Pinter draws out a connection to the male psyche.
Our first performance, the Applicant, is a complete play. In this play, Pinter gives us a nightmarish picture of bureaucratic power. And indeed members of bureaucracies have been responsible for some of the greatest obscenities of power in our time. When Adolph Eichmann, the foremost bureaucrat of the
Holocaust, was on trial, he said “I was not responsible. I was just doing my job.” The people who developed and dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki said “we were just doing our job”. In a bureaucracy, responsibility is fragmented, and so it is easy to evade guilt and shame, and act in ways one might not have behaved on one’s own. As you watch the play, ask yourself what Pinter is saying about the violence depicted and its relationship to the male psyche.
Cue to the Applicant: PLAY
Your first thought may be that this play contradicts my thesis about Pinter and the male psyche, since here it is the male who is the victim. And of course females can be just as cruel as men when they are members of a bureaucracy or hold some other position of power. But on reflection, as I’m sure you’ve gathered, the play is as much about male’s fear of inadequacy as it is about the abuse of bureaucratic power. You don’t have to be a Freudian to see that the play is a metaphor for emasculation. Pinter is a
brilliant comedic writer. But our laughter in this case is choked with embarrassment. Is this because the emasculating female haunts the male psyche?, Pinter is asking. And what compensating violent reactions does this fear engender?
We are introducing each scene with a Leonard Cohen song, because Cohen’s music speaks directly to the theme of this lecture. The song entitled The Future that introduced this scene depicts a world where brute power reigns supreme, because civilized constraints that once dampened our brute instincts have
disappeared completely, and, as Cohen says, “the blizzard of the world has overturned the order of the soul”:
Give me back my broken night
my mirrored room, my secret life
it’s lonely here,
there’s no one left to torture
Give me absolute control
over every other living soul
And lie beside me, baby,
that’s an order!
The scene from our second play, the Lover, deals with sexual power. In this case, Pinter explores the sexual power women have over men, and the jealousy and resentment that erupts when men feel themselves slighted or victimized by this power.
The action begins in the final part of the play. A wealthy businessman is returning home to his upper class house and his upper class wife. Earlier in the play we learn that the husband and wife have been engaging in a long-standing and mutually satisfying sexual fantasy in which each pretends to be someone else, and indeed each other’s lover. As our scene begins, the husband is returning from work. But earlier in the day he had played the lover and so had been at the house as his wife’s fantasy. But the rendezvous, we learn, had not worked out. Something has been bothering the husband. He is clearly disgruntled. The mask has begun to wear thin; his ego is withering. Is he still her man, he seems to be asking himself? Or is his wife attracted to the fantasy more than she is to him?
CUE TO Scene from the The Lover
There is a tendency to think that all abuses of power are the result of corrupt institutions. But The Lover suggests that one source of obscene power is within ourselves. What’s happened to the husband?
Clearly he’s deeply jealous of his wife’s fantasy lover, even though the fantasy lover is himself. The husband’s ego cannot bear this burden. This self-inflicted slight to his ego has been eating away at him, and what we see in this scene is him imploding and then exploding at his wife. She is shaken by his violent reaction. There is a kind of reconciliation at the end, but we are left wondering whether the relationship will continue its downward spiral.
The wild swing between male bravado and sexual dependency is captured by Leonard Cohen’s song, “I’m Your Man”:
If you want a lover
I’ll do anything you ask me to
And if you want another kind of love
I’ll wear a mask for you
If you want a partner
Take my hand
Or if you want to strike me down in anger
Here I stand
I’m your man
Ah, the moon’s too bright
The chain’s too tight
The beast won’t go to sleep
I’ve been runnin’ through these promises to you
That I made and I could not keep
Ah but a man never got a woman back
Not by beggin’ on his knees
Or I’d crawl to you baby
And I’d fall at your feet
And I’d howl at your beauty
Like a dog in heat
And I’d claw at your heart
And I’d tear at your sheet
I’d say please
I’m your man
Our final scene, which comes from the play Party Time, deals with the obscenity of political and social power. As we enter the play, there is a party going on. The party-goers are upper class. Outside there is a bothersome protest. The powerless and dispossessed are protesting. The powerful men inside talk about the protesters with cold indifference. They have shut down their sympathetic responses. Out of this indifference grows cynicism—cynicism about the poor, about women, and about politics.
Cue to Scene from the Party Time
Here we see the party-going men asserting power through displays of wealth and attractive women. In particular, we see the importance of social status to these men. But to have status you need people below you in the hierarchy. Ultimately, you need the powerless and the dispossessed. If no-one were at the
bottom, no-one could be at the top. And so cold indifference leads to cynicism, and cynicism makes it easier to exert brute power. Later in the play we realize that indeed some of the men at the Party are behind the violent treatment of the protesters. At the end of the play, Jimmy appears, looking for his sister, distraught and beat up. He has been in the protest. Speaking for the powerless, he says, through Pinter’s words: “What Am I? Sometimes a door bangs. I hear voices, and then it stops. Everything stops. It shuts down. I see nothing at any time any more. I sit sucking the dark.”
Social status requires that those in the higher echelons acquire political power to maintain their status, which in turn means exerting power over those who are left sucking the dark.
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich:
Leonard Cohen knows what everybody knows:
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows
This was the last of the scenes. Before I make my final comments, I would like to thank the actors who have worked hard and have done such an excellent job. Performing in The Applicant and Party Time were Allison Cann and Stephen MacIsaac, and performing in The Lover and Party Time were John Lingard and Josie Sobel.
Cue to actors coming on stage and bowing. Wait for applause
I’d like also to thank Scott Sharplin, the director, who is behind you in the booth. It’s been a pleasure working with him. He’s a real professional, and his arrival at CBU last year has been a
great boon to the theatre programme.
Wait for applause
Harold Pinter received the Nobel Prize in 2007. He was dying of cancer, and he was too sick to go to Stockholm. But he wrote a speech, which he delivered sitting in a wheel chair. In the speech, Pinter’s outrage at the abuse of political and institutional power is front and centre, just as it is in his plays. But the plays, as we’ve seen, point to a deeper truth, namely the sources of obscenity within ourselves, especially as found in the male psyche. Through his plays, Pinter sought to expose these deeper sources of obscene power. Here is Pinter speaking near the end of his Nobel Speech:
Cue to Nobel Speech video of Pinter
(“When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.”)
Pinter’s plays point to an old theme, one could almost say a religious theme: That the improvement of the world lies as much, or more, in the reformation of the soul as it does in bringing about political change. Not an easy task, and perhaps in the end, an impossible one. Humans are primates, and primates are territorial, hierarchical, and, when crossed, vicious. These factors, I believe Pinter tells us, are not a distortion of our nature. They are our nature.
“The truth stares at us”, says Pinter. But only when we “smash the mirror” of our own surface self-reflections can we see the truth. Pinter wanted his plays to help smash the mirror. It is a view of the theatre that Liz and Harry Boardmore would have applauded.
Cue to End (Music—Now We Take Manhattan)