Complete Works, Volume I Read Free

hiding. It is in the silence that they are most evident to me.
    There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it. That is its continual reference. The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps theother in its place. When true silence falls we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant strategem to cover nakedness.
    We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase: ‘Failure of communication’ . . . and this phrase has been fixed to my work quite consistently. I believe the contrary. I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.
    I am not suggesting that no character in a play can ever say what he in fact means. Not at all. I have found that there invariably does come a moment when this happens, when he says something, perhaps, which he has never said before. And where this happens, what he says is irrevocable, and can never be taken back.
    A blank page is both an exciting and a frightening thing. It's what you start from. There follow two further periods in the progress of a play. The rehearsal period and the performance. A dramatist will absorb a great many things of value from an active and intense experience in the theatre, throughout these two periods. But finally he is again left looking at the blank page. In that page is something or nothing. You don't know until you've covered it. And there's no guarantee that you will know then. But it always remains a chance worth taking.
    I've written nine plays, for various mediums, and at the moment I haven't the slightest idea how I've managed to do it. Each play was, for me, ‘a different kind of failure’. And that fact, I suppose, sent me on to write the next one.
    And if I find writing plays an extremely difficult task, while still understanding it as a kind of celebration, how much moredifficult it is to attempt to rationalise the process, and how much more abortive, as I think I've clearly demonstrated to you this morning.
    Samuel Beckett says, at the beginning of his novel The Unnamable , ‘The fact would seem to be, if in my situation one may speak of facts, not only that I shall have to speak of things of which I cannot speak, but also, which is even more interesting, but also that I, which is if possible even more interesting, that I shall have to, I forget, no matter.’

The Birthday Party

     
    THE BIRTHDAY PARTY was first presented by Michael Codron and David Hall at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, on 28 April, 1958, and subsequently at the Lyric Opera House, Hammersmith, with the following cast:
    PETEY, a man in his sixties
Willoughby Gray
MEG, a woman in her sixties
Beatrix Lehmann
STANLEY, a man in his late thirties
Richard Pearson
LULU, a girl in her twenties
Wendy Hutchinson
GOLDBERG, a man in his fifties
John Slater
MCCANN, a man of thirty
John Stratton
    Directed by Peter Wood
    ACT I A morning in summer
    ACT II Evening of the same day
    ACT III The next morning
    THE BIRTHDAY PARTY was revived by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre, London, on June 18th, 1964 with the following cast:
    PETEY
Newton Blick
MEG
Doris Hare
STANLEY
Bryan Pringle
LULU
Janet Suzman
GOLDBERG
Brewster Mason
MCCANN
Patrick Magee
    Directed by Harold Pinter

     
     
    Act One
    The living-room of a house in a seaside town. A door leading to the hall down left. Back door and small window up left. Kitchen hatch, centre back. Kitchen door up right. Table and chairs, centre.
    PETEY