4 - Efficient Ideas

Summary

The germ of my plays? I'll be as accurate as I can about that. I went into a room and saw one person standing up and one person sitting down, and a few weeks later I wrote The Room. I went into another room and saw two people sitting down, and a few years later I wrote The Birthday Party. I looked through a door into a third room, and saw two people standing up and I wrote The Caretaker.

Flippant and evasive as it might sound, this is about as accurate a description of Pinter's creative process as he has ever felt able to make. It is nevertheless extremely revealing. Each of Pinter's plays seems to be constructed around a single premise. Each has some crisis, imbalance or mystery that its entire dramatic momentum is geared toward resolving or revealing. If a director, actor or, ultimately, a spectator wants to discover the kernel of any of these plays, they might do worse than contemplate the primal situation which gives rise to all of the words and action. Pinter's descriptions of the geneses of many of his plays are remarkably consistent with one another. As in the above example, he often states that he starts with an initial image or snatches of conversation that strike him as particularly loaded and then, he claims, allows things to follow their own course:

I have usually begun a play in quite a simple manner; found a couple of characters in a particular context, thrown them together and listened to what they said, keeping my nose to the ground (VV 17).

The word ‘found’ here is pertinent, in that whatever spark first ignites Pinter's passion to write, it always comes by way of unexpected inspiration. Old Times and No Man's Land, for example, both came into being from sudden bursts of inspiration that struck him, respectively, whilst reading a paper on a sofa and whilst riding in a taxi. The subsequent plays unfolded out of the images and words of two people civilly sharing a late-night drink together or two other people talking about one other. But, Pinter claims, that process of unfolding plot and motivation is dictated wholly by the discovered characters, not the writer.