There’s always been a perverse pleasure in entering Pinter’s implacable universe, watching him strip away illusions as we listen to his disquieting dialogue. He brought a new sound to the stage, an up-side-down poetry crafted with fierce precision out of innuendo, insinuation, invective. Pinter’s notorious pauses create a negative music, a syncopated silence, like a heart skipping a beat under the pressure of its bad faith. “Moonlight” resonates strongly with this strangely seductive music.
The problem is, we’ve heard these songs before. Andy reflects: “I do not say I was loved. Love is an attribute no civil servant worth his salt would give house room to.” In Pinter’s 1976 “No Man’s Land,” a character says: “I have never been loved. From this I derive my strength.” Speaking of their common mistress, Maria, Andy tells Bel: “She’s the one we both should have married.” In “Betrayal,” a husband, speaking of his wife’s lover, says: “Perhaps I should have had an affair with him myself.” You don’t have to catch these and other echoes to feel a lack of freshness and urgency that bedevils this beautifully crafted play.
This sense of recycling golden oldies may indicate a crossroad or a crisis for Pinter. He’s always been one of the world’s most politically active writers in anti-authoritarian causes. For the past 15 years his plays, all short, have been mostly powerful attacks on state torture and repression, like “Mountain Language” and “One for the Road.” Ten years ago he admitted that after dealing with that kind of reality, it “makes it very difficult to write anything. I don’t know what my future is as a writer.” “Moonlight” may be his attempt to return to his former modes and meanings. Or is it fanciful to think that the play is a symbolic elegy for those old modes, that with the dying Andy, Pinter is saying farewell to an aspect of his art that he feels has been overwhelmed by the enormity of reality?
If so, the elegy is sensitively conducted by Karel Reisz and played with true Pinter pitch, including Kathleen Widdoes and Paul Hecht as visitants from the past of Andy and Bcl. Pinter said in 1985, “I believe there is no chance of the world coming to other than a very grisly end in 25 years at the outside. Unless God, as it were, finally speaks.” This is a theme–including God–that would stretch his unique genius.
