February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Joseph Hurley
LANDSCAPE. NY Harold Pinter. A Gate Theatre Dublin production at Lincoln Center Festival 2001.
Amid the success of the recently concluded Harold Pinter Festival, which Michael Colgan and the Gate Theatre Dublin brought to New York as part of the Lincoln Center Festival 2001, there were perhaps three undeniable standouts.
The enigmatic “The Homecoming” was one of the anointed trio since it has attained the status of a modern classic.
The second was probably “Celebration,” a fast-moving farce but laced with bitterness and perversity.
The third contemporary classic was a little-known, 39-minute one-act, “Landscape,” utilizing just two actors in a kitchen setting near a seashore, one of the clearest, most trenchant of Pinter pieces.
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The play, at Lincoln Center, was perfectly directed by Karel Reisz, and flawlessly performed by London’s Penelope Wilton and Dublin’s Stephen Brennan.
On its surface, “Landscape,” which debuted in 1967, seems as direct and uncomplicated, in psychological terms, as another classic at this festival, “A Kind of Alaska,” comes across as clever and convoluted.
Beth and Duff, a middle-aged couple, sit alone at a wooden kitchen table. Behind them, in the wood-panelled room, the audience sees a sink, the open cupboard of which reveals a bucket or two.
Beth looks forward, speaking her thoughts in a form of interior monologue, never once glancing in the direction of her companion. For his part, Duff attempts to communicate, speaking directly to his unresponding partner, and often leaning in her direction as he relates the ordinary, even banal, details of the day.
Duff and Beth are, it soon becomes apparent, “in service,” hired by a largely absent man named Sykes to look after his house and grounds. So thorough is the employer that he has even selected and purchased a blue dress of a certain shade for Beth, so that she might make a positive impression in the unlikely-seeming event that guests should arrive.
Duff speaks of a dog that seems to have gone missing, failing to return from a walk to “the pond,” which he and Duff has undertaken. He speaks of the birds he has seen and heard, and comments on the vast amount of animal excrement he has encountered on his walk. He even inquires of Beth at one point whether or not she wants him to continue chatting at her in this manner, giving her details of the way his day has progressed.
She offers no response. The tale she relates is concerned with a moment, perhaps in the distant past, when she lay in sand dunes with a man she appears not to have known, and with whom she may or may not have had a physical relationship.
This blend of leaden small talk and elegiac high-flying reverie, serves as a kind of tolerable compromise at which certain couples have arrived in order to endure a moribund marriage.
The story is one of sexual frustration, of hopes dashed, of dreams destroyed, as opposed to merely being deferred.
Director Deisz has kept the focus of “Landscape” relentlessly on his actors, and they come through for him with brilliance and inspiration.
Penelope Wilton, working on a New York stage for the first time, may remind you of Frances Sternhagen in terms of the simplicity and directness with which she works. She sits and spins her tale without adornment – but something transcendent takes place in the space between her lovely, plain face and your own eyes and ears.
Stephen Brennan seems at first like standard issue, blunted, bullying stage husband material, but he reveals subtleties and nuances his roughish appearance might not automatically suggest.
“Landscape,” in just 39 measured minutes, evokes images denied to countless longer, more “ambitious” works. The performances of Penelope Wilton and Stephen Brennan, on view so briefly in Lincoln Center’s wondrous Harold Pinter Festival, had the power to follow you out of the theater and live on with you until memory clouds and fades away.