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Ian Barrett, Oxford
How do you feel the play based on Oliver Sacks' Awakenings, A Kind
of Alaska, fits in with the rest of the Pinter canon?
Michael Billington
A Kind of Alaska is unusual because it's the only major play in
the Pinter canon that is drawn from an existing source. A strange
fact there, all Pinter's plays really come from his imagination,
all Pinter's film-scripts are based on existing books and he makes
that distinction himself. A Kind of Alaska comes from Awakenings,
is based on a very specific case in that book and yet what is curious
is that although Pinter is dealing with medical reality he makes
the subject very much his own. As you know, in the play a woman
wakes after a prolonged period of sleeping sickness and it's about
her bewildered reaction to the world around her and about the fact
that all her memories are based on her childhood. Although Pinter
is transcribing Sack's medical account he makes the material his
own and allows it to chime in with his own obsessions - with the
nature of memory, with our own strange reaction to the world around
us. Sacks himself commented on the fact that when he first read
the play and was sent Pinter's manuscript he thought it wasn't in
anyway alien but something that accorded with his own experiences.
It's a perfect choice of material for a writer like Pinter who is
concerned with the alien nature of human experience and with the
pervasive power of memory.
Rita Sedani, Waltham Abbey
I was first introduced to Pinter's works three years ago, during
my A-levels. As a result I am now very interested in Pinter's works.
One of the features of his plays are power struggles. In your opinion
which character would you say "won" in The Homecoming
and were Teddy and Ruth's lives in America actual fact or a figment
of their imagination?
Michael Billington
Pinter's plays are about power struggles. My interpretation of The
Homecoming is that Ruth does win and you can deduce that from the
fact that at the end of the play she's occupying the central chair
which at the beginning of the play was occupied by Max, then the
head of the household. At the end of the play Ruth is in the chair,
Max is a sad old man slobbering at her feet begging for a kiss.
One of Max's sons has his head resting in Ruth's lap and the other
son, Lenny, who wanted to control her apparently impotent and unable
to control her. So it seems to me that Ruth has walked into this
household, this appalling male atmosphere and taken it over and,
I think, endowed it with the female principle. That is only my view
but it seems to me game, set and match to Ruth. As for Ruth's life
in America, I believe you have to treat it as fact. The images that
Pinter uses to convey this are to do with aridity, sterility and
comfort and what he's implying is that Ruth has willingly sacrificed
the glamour of American academic life and its emptiness for the
rough vitality of an East End in which she grew up.
Alexander Leach, Muswell Hill, North London
Who is your favourite character from a Pinter play and why?
Michael Billington
Max in The Homecoming because you see so many aspects of him. At
the start of the play he's loud, blustering, bullying, "Has
anybody seen the scissors?" he cries. As the play goes on you
realise behind this façade of domination is a man who's anxious,
old, fearful. He's losing his status in the household because of
the power of his sons. He's aware that his wife betrayed him with
his best friend MacGregor and he gets curiously excited by the arrival
of his unexpected daughter-in-law, Ruth. At the end he's slavishly
dependent upon her favours. Many of these I hasten to add are not
admirable qualities! Max has linguistic vitality and an extraordinary
range of emotions and any man who starts as a domineering patriarch
and ends as a very sad old man must remind you of King Lear. In
the recent revival of the play Ian Holm played Max, having played
King Lear and the parallels between the two characters suddenly
became blindingly obvious
Life
& Works
| Billington's Biography
| Language | Acting
| Specific Themes | Influence
& Influences
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