Too hot to handle ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

23 July

* Contains spoilers *

The Hothouse is unmistakeable Pinter, and brings to mind what little I know of his political writings or late plays such as One for the Road, but I am unsure whether it needed a revival – or at least one that did not take greater risks with what dates back to the late 1950s, and was not staged by Pinter until more than twenty years later. (Perhaps the fact that, well before the end of the run, the expensive seats were available at a large discount is indicative of an answer, and the possibility that that trend may continue.)

What it did not need, at any rate, was Simon Russell Beale (Roote) turning the alacrity of a former colonel into too often huffing and gabbling the text, so that one word ran into the next – at the interval, I chose to try to establish whether the performance was representative by asking an usher at Trafalgar Studios, but he had not heard the first half, although he thought that people generally thought the delivery clear.

(I believe this to have been a misjudgement on Russell Beale’s part between a brisk characterization and audibility, because he performed Roote’s Christmas address fully in character and as if extemporized, but without compromising the careful detail of Pinter’s script.)

With this general exception, all of the cast was clear, and what stuck out for me was the beauty of execution and poise of the soliloquy given to Lush (John Heffernan), when he reports to Gibbs (John Simm) the visit of 6457’s mother. Taken out of context, and ignoring its exact content, the construction is pure Pinter, and Heffernan had the speech exactly right, as, I felt, he did Lush’s character (what’s in a name !*).

People such as 6457 we almost think that we must have seen, because Pinter gives an almost exact repetition between Gibbs and Roote of the guessing game where the latter tries to place what 6457 (and, later, 6459) looked like. Through Pinter’s stage-directions, we sense the unnamed inmates of this institution, but we are hardly allowed to feel them, because we are focused only on the staff (the lesser, ancillary staff are called the understaff).

This is where I come to what place The Hothouse (revised by Pinter when he staged it in 1980) has, and would set it against what we gather, without being anywhere near it, of the establishment in The Caretaker where Davies seems to have been given electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) : it all comes from Davies’ mouth, and it is truly and rivetingly distressing (the pun words ‘shocking’ and ‘electric’ first came to mind). We have Davies and we have his narration of this experience, and they seem to marry in a way that, perhaps, setting interactions between staff against that background does not.

In essence, The Hothouse is what we no longer expect from Pinter, a plot with a clear trajectory (even if there are puzzles along the way), which is not even a model that fits that well with The Birthday Party, a contemporary play. I think it is probably that he is doing too much (e.g. Roote’s diatribe against the patients being called by numbers, which turns out to be hot air, because he has no intention of trying to press for its being overturned), and ends up doing too little : with too little edge, as was maybe the case here, it can resemble a just slightly sinister version of Yes, Prime Minister.

Not to say that there is not power in scenes, such as the writing of the interrogation of Lamb (although not staged as Pinter appears to have envisaged) or the tightrope that Lush walks with Roote by challenging him about 6457 and 6459, but Lamb’s utterances to Miss Cutts point at that sort of inept bureaucracy, and even Roote is embroiled with rusty Ministry typewriters and the imperfections of the heating.

There is menace and tension if you know where to find it, but the work can be top heavy, driven by the situation, rather than, as in The Homecoming, the house being the backdrop to seeing the characters and watching them test each other. Simm I did not find right with his approach to Gibbs (Charlie, as Lush tries to call him), because, if Roote is a blusterer (as he surely is in the text), there has to be a little more to Gibbs than pedantry. After all, pedants do not necessarily of themselves make torturers, the thing that the ridiculously sex-driven Daisy Cutts (convincingly played by Indira Varma), always seeking to subvert or seduce into a lay, finds most exciting about Gibbs.

The Hothouse is casually set on Christmas Day – when that date in the calendar comes, I wonder how much this production will be remembered…


There is more here about the play, for those interested.



End-notes

* It may pass the observer by, but all of the names are monosyllables : Roote, Gibbs, Cutts, Lush, Lamb, Tubb, Lobb, Hogg. (The full list of the slain, given to Lobb by Gibbs, also has Beck, Budd, Tuck, Dodds, Tate and Pett.)


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