What the Swedes Read: Harold Pinter

• LAUREATE: Harold Pinter (2005, Britain)
• BOOK READ: Ashes to Ashes

If I had to choose, I’d read five bad novels instead of attending one bad night of theater. Scratch that: ten bad novels. Actually, there’s no reason to even concoct some hypothetical choice, because it happens in real life all the time. Not so long ago, I went to see some bad theater, and during intermission, my companion and I were debating whether or not to leave. She mentioned a novel she’d read recently. I said that I didn’t like it, and that’s when we decided to go get a drink and talk about it. Not only do I prefer a bad novel to a bad show, I prefer talking about a bad novel to a bad show.

Why? Well, when I come across a clumsy piece of prose, I can lay the book down for a moment until my mortification passes. But when I’m staring at an actor working himself into a frenzy of epiphany or breakdown that feels flat and ridiculous, I’m trapped. I get the same urge I have when a friend gets too drunk at a party: Please, please, quiet down and come with me. I’ll take you home, you poor, foolish thing. Stop telling me that there’s something loud and unstageable—a battle, say, or a fire—off in the wings. Stop concocting weird excuses to leave—”I think I’ll take a little walk”—at the conclusion of a big scene, so you can leave the other actor onstage to confront somebody else. Stop staring out the window when we all know you’re just looking at some ropes and a burly stagehand. Just stop the whole thing.

That bad show I walked out of? I’m sorry to say it was a play by Harold Pinter. This wasn’t the first Pinter I’d seen on the stage, and each production had been lunkier than the next, not to mention a handful of televised Pinter performances I’d dozed through in high-school English. I never liked it. Sometimes his work seemed like it belonged to the tradition of plays that are for some reason considered “realistic”—you know, where the family stalks around the house in angry pairs, devoting an evening to shouting explosive truths that for some reason they were all able to keep to themselves, while living together, for years and years. Sometimes it looked like he was making fun of such a tradition, with his very stylized dialogue and the occasional burst of nonsense. But the jokey material made the domestic drama distant and abstract, and the domestic drama made the jokey stuff fall flat. The result was always people in unbelievable situations behaving unbelievably,...