by
Laura Lai/Review
The play ‘A Slight Ache’ written
by the Nobel Laureate for Literature (2005) Harold Pinter was
broadcasted by BBC Radio 4 in 2001 (first broadcasted by BBC 3 in 1959) on the
occasion of Pinter’s 70s birthday. [Fortunately, this British dramatist was
alive when appreciated by peers and the public. My point is that sometimes and
some people have a … ‘funny’ way of appreciating the works of somebody: they
despise him/her badly while alive and they love him/her dearly and his/her work
post-mortem.]
The upload of this
play on You Tube gathered different opinions. If the play is the way I
understood it, in my view is brilliant. Really brilliant! In fact, the play ‘A
Slight Ache’, directed by Ned Chaillet, describes a day in the married couple
of Flora (Jill Johnson) and Edward (Harold Pinter) - in the longest day of the
year starting with 9.30 am – when Edward is annoyed by a match seller sitting
outside their back gate that they succeed in inviting in. I’m not surprised
that at the end of it, some of those who listened the play on You Tube (as I
did) have asked themselves: ‘What was this all about?’
My view is that this play is about
marriage and is brilliantly organized around the match seller (Who is he? How is
he? Why is he sitting there? Since when, for how long, etc.) and on the dichotomy
male-female approach on different issues (meaning complimentarily or
opposition).
For
example, Edward thinks that he got himself a partner when he married Flora –
that was beautiful and compassionate. By
the way he treats her though, he got himself a servant: ‘do that!’, ‘bring me
that!’ etc. At its turn, Flora accepts to be treated like a servant:
‘Would you like to have lunch in the garden?’
The dichotomy starts the moment
of the killing of a wasp in the very beginning of the play: for her is an ‘awful
experience’, while for him it’s a ‘wonderful day’. The actual inviting of the
match seller – that for Edward is ‘an impostor’ and ‘there is something fake
about him’, while for her he is ‘a harmless old man’ who may barely sees and
hears – is a linguistic treat for those speaking English as a foreign language,
as in my case, to hear some original British English:
‘Would you care for a cup of tea?’ Or
‘Would you care for goose? We have goose for
lunch.’
Flora was sent by her husband to
bring the match seller in and this was her approach. To me, at this stage the
dichotomy is very evident: not only that Flora tells her husband ‘a woman will
often succeed, but a man will invariable fail’, but also in the questions that
a man, Edward, addresses to the match seller and those that a woman, Flora,
addresses to the same match seller. He wants to offer a drink, he praises himself
with his work, his essays, his collections, his maps, but Flora is more into
sex ‘as a vital experience’ discovering with fascination ‘the solid old boy’,
not the ‘jelly’ as her husband thought. The ‘solid old boy’ who’s now ‘ugly and
smell’ who needs a ‘bath and a scrub’ – How sick does it sound?!
Edward
is also into the match seller's boyhood: ‘Have
you ever kicked the ball?’, he asks. This question made me laugh. I’m a
passionate football watcher, but I never kicked the ball. Never been interested
to. Instead, I loved playing a ball game, which I played yearlong – that all
people of my generation played – in which I loved to be a ‘goose’ (my favorite
position in the field J).
I’m personally very happy and very amused by the fact that Pinter’s play
reminded me of this game called ‘The Hunters and the Geese’ for which you need …
of course two teams. All children wanting to play this game put one hand on the
ball, one above the other. The child holding the ball starts removing the hands
saying ‘hunter’, ‘goose’, ‘hunter’, ‘goose’ until the last hand. In this way
are the two teams decided. The ‘hunters’ divide themselves into two teams that
sit on the two sides of a play field that we decide how big to be. In the
middle sit the ‘geese’. The hunters pass the ball to each other trying to hit with
the ball a ‘goose’. I was always the last of the ‘geese’: I loved to turn, to
jump over the ball, to bend, etc. in order not to be hit and not to be out. Indeed,
I used to be a hard-to-hit ‘goose’... a talented ‘goose’! J.
Sometimes some ‘hunters’ (girls and boys alike, like the geese) ‘adapted’ the
rules and they were setting at the beginning of the game that if your skirt was
touched or the larger blouse, than it’s considered that the ‘goose’ is hit and
is out. As I don’t like to argue on people’s rules adaptations, I played in trousers.
Well, I wish I could say ‘Thank you, Harold, for reminding me of this game!’
These above mentioned points are
not the only reasons I believe the play is brilliant. I wonder – as I’m not
British and I only shortly lived in Britain – how customary is it for a salesman to
sell matches in front of a gate in Britain’s countryside? Or Pinter
intentionally chose a match salesman to point on two men comparing each other
and to point on a man and a woman matching more or less in a marriage? A match
makes also a flame. That’s the way some marriages start and then some marriages
become – as Flora and Edward’s marriage – ‘A Slight Ache’, meaning a slight dull
and steady pain.
Remember that a dramatist is
first thinking of all these things, all these elements that he wants to express
and then he finds a form – a drama from – to wrap in words what was first in
his mind. It’s complex, it’s difficult and it requires lots of craft. The way I
understood the play, I find it brilliant. What do you think?
Enjoy it!
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