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Pinter: In Other Rooms

Seven rarely performed plays were juxtaposed to present a world in which party venues become secret places of interrogation and torture. The plays were chosen to show that Pinter’s later, overtly political drama does not forego the metaphorical density of his earlier work but instead that the trope of interrogation constitutes a leitmotif that connects the compulsion to possess knowledge of the other with the will to exert power through language and violence. This was especially important outside Britain, where Pinter’s theatre is misleadingly regarded as ‘absurdist’.

The fashionable guests of Party Time represent an invisible hierarchy of power from which some are wholly excluded as political ‘untouchables’ – like Jimmy who speaks from the dark isolation of prison. By becoming the examiner in The Examination the victim, Jimmy, becomes an interrogator who in turn becomes the subject of interrogation. In Press Conference a government official (played here as a woman) turns her routine questioning by the press into a chilling display of authoritarian doublespeak, an image succeeded by that of two cheerful interrogators who force a hooded victim to imagine his anticipated torture in A New World Order. A husband’s bullying insistence on his view of the first intimate encounter with his wife in Night reveals language as a battlefield, as does the comic interrogation by radio of a passive-aggressive taxi driver seated in his parked car, by his isolated and increasingly desperate controller in Victoria Station. Mountain Language shockingly represents the erotic economy that motivates military authority to dehumanise political prisoners by denying them freedom to speak their native language. The use of a section from Party Time as a coda represents ‘the ‘new world order’ as the power of the wealthiest nations to dictate the meaning of justice to those who cannot afford to pay for it.