Pinter's "Hothouse' at Lantern Theater

Better late than never: Last year the Lantern Theater gave the Philadelphia premiere of David Hare's Skylight, a play from the twilight of Britain's Thatcher era. Now it has reached back a good deal further to present Harold Pinter's apprentice drama, The Hothouse, which Pinter himself kept on the shelf for 20 years before authorizing a production in 1978.

Old movies are one thing; old plays are another. A film like, say, David Lean's Brief Encounter can plunge one at once into the glum privations of postwar Britain. With a play of similar vintage, there's a lot more to be done, simply because of the nature of the medium. The film requires only a projector and screen; it's an authentic period artifact as it stands, and has no need of presenting its bona fides. But a theatrical revival requires imaginative reconstruction; it must make its own authenticity and at the same time provide its own rationale.

Why, an audience will ask, should we invest ourselves in a 50-year-old play whose author apparently never thought much of it himself, when we can see a brand new one that might tell us something about our present moment?

The audience thinks it's a comedy

I think I can understand why Pinter shelved The Hothouse. It's an absurdist play, very much influenced by Ionesco, and still groping for the voice we call Pinteresque. The characters, if one can call them such, stalk and menace one another, but without real intent. The audience is invited to laugh, and it does; it thinks it is watching a comedy.

Of course, we know we are watching Pinter, and when we are treated to a very unfunny coda, we smile, knowing Harold has had mayhem up his sleeve all the while. But has he? The ending is contrived and unnecessary, the sort of thing a young playwright might tack on for lack of trust in his own instincts.

And yet The Hothouse, for all its faults, is also a play bursting with Pinter's early genius. It is a work too that, period piece though it be, is startlingly visionary. A few words need to be said about that.

England, emerging from its slump

England in 1958 was just emerging from a long postwar slump, and beginning to enjoy a modest prosperity. The welfare state had recently arrived, giving English workers benefits that American workers today can still only dream of. Yet the public mood remained sour, and John Osborne's Angry Young Man was the prototype of the new generation.

True, England was losing its empire and painfully adapting to a very reduced status in the world. But there was something more to the matter— and The Hothouse, with blundering perception, puts its finger on it.

The setup of the play is briefly told. It takes place in an asylum of some sort, government-sponsored although privately run. Officially, it's described as a rest home, though its patients—inmates? — have no names, but only numbers. Roote, the director (Paul L. Nolan), seems not to have the foggiest, and his staff, alternately deferential and insolent, push and pull him pretty much at will.

A metaphor for bureaucratic incompetence

A few things are definitely amiss: One "patient" appears to have died, and another has had a child. Roote blusters that he will soon get to the bottom of all this, but we understand that the asylum is really bottomless: a metaphor for the abyss of a bureaucratized class society in which power is at once total, random and incompetent.

This, I think, was Pinter's central insight into the stratified world of post-imperial England, with its nascent nanny state that had replaced colonized foreign populations with a single domestic one. He and a very few others— I think of Erving Goffman and his concept of total institutions— had perceived that liberal welfarism wasn't a happy third way between laissez-faire capitalism and the totalitarian state, but a muddled, bad-faith compromise that in some respects reflected the worst aspects of both.

Orwell's road to 1984

George Orwell was groping toward the same idea in his last years, too. At the outbreak of World War II, Orwell had written a brief, hopeful book, The Lion and the Unicorn, which described a socialist Britain that, though genuinely transformative, could be peacefully achieved. The postwar welfare state introduced by Clement Attlee was, if not the world of Orwell's dreams, at least plausibly a step toward it. Yet Orwell responded to it with a dark and savage book, 1984, from which all hope was to be permanently banished.

Orwell was of course responding to the nuclear specter and the Cold War as well as to developments in England. But in some ways Pinter gets closer to the heart of the matter in The Hothouse, with his suggestion of what liberal tyranny had begun to look like. His play is dated, yes, in the sense that it is a report on a contemporary situation, but it's no less prophetic, because that situation is still ours.

Sinister befuddlement

Paul L. Nolan, a veteran of the Lantern's previous production of Pinter's The Birthday Party, is in excellent form as Roote, putting a touch of Ralph Richardson into his sinister befuddlement, and the supporting cast— Mike Dees, John Morrison, Peter Pryor, Luigi Sottile, and, as the dragon lady of the crew, Kristyn Chouiniere— is likewise fine. Kathryn MacMillan's direction is brisk and spare, and Christopher Colucci's sound design, so essential to the play's effect, is especially to be commended.

The Hothouse works partly because of its defects, rather than in spite of them. If it's not quite sure of how it got where it is and where it's going, neither (as our own institutions collapse around us) are we.