Moonlight

I was drunk when I saw Moonlight. Not under the table, not by a long chalk. I was never a man of that stamp. I had passed the time of day with an old friend. You probably know him. He was known to imbibe the finest wines without breaking step, a game at which I was strictly the amateur.

It’s true. Weak Pinter pastiche aside, I saw the first production of Moonlight at the Almeida in 1993 after a day of drinking with a friend so its memory is very hazy. I do remember Ian Holm, bedridden and misanthropic, and Anna Massey, extremely chilly as his scornfully suffering wife. At the time, the scenes I most relished were the two brothers, played by Douglas Hodge and Michael Sheen (what a cast that was), whose bantering role play seemed a thin crust over two hollow selves, hollowed out by loss and the imminence of death.

It’s a play that defies summary but broadly a dying man taking his mortality out on his stoic, unloving wife. Elsewhere their two sons banter and replay imagined episodes of their life. Two family friends - remembered? actual? imagined? - engage in vapid bourgeois chit-chat while elsewhere, through the wreckage of these lives, wanders Bridget, a lost daughter, a ghost, recalling a life lived at moonlight.

It’s a very beautiful play and oddly uncharacteristic in some ways. It’s a play whose meaning is relatively clear; it’s a play about death, approaching death, our fear of death. The title, probably, suggests an image of fading life struggling against the darkness of the grave. The family are living not only with the father, Andy, and his impending demise, but also in the shadow of the daughter’s disappearance or death. In this fine production, Fred, one of the two sons, is pale and sickening, lying on his death bed. Their jokes are desperate improvisations, it seems, to evade the horror of life ending.

There's a thing almost all playwrights do where we write a speech which is meant to express some core meaning of the play. Often it takes a more lyrical or more strident tone than the rest of the play, signalling out, trying to have an effect. It can be rather moving, a yearning that rolls out over the footlights. But it's always - isn't it? - an admission of defeat, a moment of thinking that the means of production, the techniques and processes of dramaturgy, aren't working for us, can't be trusted. So this desperate new course is pursued, trying to have a direct effect, opening a wound to the audience.

Pinter never does that. His words are always actions; they are blunt and complex, harsh and lyrical. They do things onstage without any desire to please. This is no doubt connected to the personality of Harold Pinter himself, apparently blunt, uncompromising, not placing a great priority on being liked. In his interviews, well some of them, there’s a grouchy, piss-taking, passive-aggressive refusal to comply with the questions. I remember reading an hilarious interview with Peter Hall po-facedly explaining the indigenous cockney custom of ‘taking the piss’ and how he adapted this obscure native custom to his production of The Homecoming. Here we get a disquisition on ‘taking the piss’ which in itself takes the piss. There’s an aggressive relish in language here, rolling the cliches around the tongue, allowing them to bump into each other to startling, comic, alienating effect. There are lurches between register and tone. There are moments of luxurious verbal excess, parodic literary style, crudity and aggression. Always there’s a fluency and rhythmic, prosodic expertise that was always Pinter’s great gift. Listen to this speech Bel’s (the wife):

Yes, it’s quite true that all your life in all your personal and social attachments the language you employed was mainly coarse, crude, vacuous, puerile, obscene and brutal to a degree. Most people were ready to vomit after no more than ten minutes in your company. But this is not to say that beneath this vicious some would say demented exterior there did not exist a delicate even poetic sensibility, the sensibility of a young horse in the golden age, in the golden past of our forefathers.

With the sense of someone reviewing their life, the play is haunted by earlier Pinter plays. Bridget’s speeches remind me of Ruth’s in The Homecoming (‘And there’s lots of insects there’). Late Pinter is increasingly drawn to these monologues to find bursts of something poetically other to the brutality of his scenes. The last speech of Party Time for example (‘When everything is quiet I hear my heart’) or Rebecca’s recollection (imagination?) of seeing a refugee (?) woman (‘She listened to the baby’s heartbeat. The baby’s heart was beating’). It has some affinities with the weird bourgeois roleplaying and chilly mental landscape of No Man’s Land, too, but it is its own play.

In 1993, I was most transfixed by the young men. But then I was a young man. Now it’s Andy and Bel, the love and regrets, the anger and affection, that seems to speak so eloquently. I liked this production very much. A stage and rear wall in Yves Klein blue, edged in white light; the characters disposed across the stage; and the girl, Bridget, in her underwear, wandering through the ruins. It may be lesser Pinter, but lesser Pinter is better than most.