Listening to a Pinter double bill: Mitchell’s direction of Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes at the Royal Court Theatre

ABSTRACT

The double bill of Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes at the Royal Court Theatre in June-July 2001 has proven to be a kind of its own in the history of productions of Pinter’s plays for the stage. What I attempt to do in this essay is to recapture the double bill by analysing a monophonic and unedited sound-only recording of the performance of Mountain Language on 2 July 2001 and that of the performance of Ashes to Ashes on the same date, both archived in the British Library. I will show 1) how sounds in the performances of the two plays related to one another; and 2) how significant Katie Mitchell’s direction of both plays and Gareth Fry’s sound design for the double bill were at the crossroads of Pinter, performance, and sound.

KEYWORDS:

• Harold Pinter
• Katie Mitchell
• sound
• performance
• recording

[E]ven after the widespread availability of recording technologies, sound events remain difficult to archive and all but impossible to transcribe on the page.

Adalaide Morris in Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies

Introduction

Pinter in performance

In his Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama, W. B. Worthen draws our attention to the stage directions in Harold Pinter’s play-texts. Pointing out that the word “Pause” always “occup[ies] a separate line”—with “extra spacing above and below”—in the “standard” editions of Pinter’s work (Worthen 2005, 75), Worthen muses,

I wonder whether Pinter’s Pauses and Silences would have seemed so freighted with complexity had the plays been laid out differently on the page, which uses the design […] to assign considerable weight to what are, in the theatre, normally considered as moments in which the author is stepping on the performers’ prerogatives, their trained ability to decide the pace, rhythm, emphasis, and significance of speech. (77)

Compared to the reader of Pinter’s play-texts, for whom the question of “poetic design” (80) may indeed be profound, actors and directors in productions of Pinter’s plays seem to take a rather dry approach to “Pauses” and “Silences”. We remember director Peter Hall’s concise definitions: “Pause”, referring to “a threat, a moment of non-verbal tension”, should not be confused with “Silence”, which denotes “an extreme crisis point” (Hall 2009, 163). Douglas Hodge, an experienced Pinter actor, claims in an interview that the direction “Pause” makes physiological as well as psychological sense—rehearsing their parts in productions of Pinter’s plays, actors realise that they “need time to breathe or think or recover”, Hodge says (Cole 2019, 272–73). It turns out that, in productions, Pinter himself was more cooperative than some actors would have expected: Hodge reminisces about Pinter telling him and other actors not to be too dogmatic about every single “Pause” (272); actor Toby Stephens, also in an interview, backs Hodge up by saying, “[I]n the beginning of his writing career [Pinter] was very adamant about the pauses, but his attitude changed when he saw more and more productions, and the endless possibilities of what could be done” (Cole 2019, 364).

The springboard for this essay is an apologia which Mark Taylor-Batty makes at the beginning of his book The Theatre of Harold Pinter, namely, that he intends to “consider Pinter’s plays as imagined in their theatrical contexts” and “understand them as dramatic expression that is only alive, meaningful and meaning-generating in the moment of performance” (Taylor-Batty 2014, 11). Throughout the essay, I will discuss sound in and around productions of Pinter’s plays for the stage, which includes pointing to various instances of “Pauses” and “Silences”. Taylor-Batty writes, “[Pinter’s] skilful and measured deployment of pauses and silences as scaffold to the verbal intricacies of his characters is but one aspect of his range of theatrical strategies” (191). The playwright’s “theatrical strategies” are put into practice by staff and actors in productions with their own stage and performance designs. Also, members of the audience bear part of the responsibility for any outcomes of each performance. George Home-Cook in his Theatre and Aural Attention takes up the question of “silence”—in broad terms rather than in a Pinter context—and explains why there is no such thing as a “silent crowd” (Home-Cook 2015, 113): “[I]t is precisely the sound of the audience silencing itself, or holding itself together, that manifestly shapes the phenomenology of theatrical silence” (113; original emphasis). With all that in mind, I will turn to archival recordings of performances of Pinter’s plays. The objects for analysis are sound-only recordings, whose descriptions will be given in the next subsection but one. Focusing on two of Pinter’s plays and analysing each of them in a sound recording, the essay will attempt to shed some light on Pinter “in the moment of performance”.

A Pinter double bill

Pinter wrote dramatic works which ranged from revue sketches to full-act plays. In the twenty-first century, his revue sketches are often collected and programmed to make a freestanding “show” (see, for example, JP 2002, 16). On the other hand, a full-act play like The Homecoming usually stands on its own for an evening. Somewhere in between comes a double bill of his one-act plays. We may cite two double bills as milestones in the history of productions of Pinter’s plays for the stage. One was the double bill of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s premiere productions of Silence and Landscape at the Aldwych Theatre in 1969 (Pinter 1997a, 166; Pinter 1997b, 190)—Landscape had already been aired on radio in the previous year (Pinter 1997a, 166). Frank Marcus in his review for the New York Times writes that the Silence-Landscape sequence had a particular significance: “Whereas ‘Silence’ seems to express the author’s compassionate cry ‘only connect!’, ‘Landscape’ conveys the more worrying and pessimistic question ‘Can one connect?’” (Marcus 1969). The other was the double bill of the premiere production of Celebration and a new production of The Room, Pinter’s first play, at the Almeida Theatre in 2000 (Pinter 2005b, 438). We note that Michael Billington, the theatre critic for the Guardian, “was struck by a curious similarity between the two works”, namely, that they “both reveal Pinter’s abiding fascination with hermetic, insulated figures who suddenly find their space invaded and their territory threatened” (Billington 2000).

I take up for analysis a double bill of Pinter’s Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes which ran at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs in June-July 2001 (Macaulay 2001) and has proven to be a kind of its own in the history of productions of Pinter’s plays for the stage. The Theatre Downstairs was one of the two theatres in the Royal Court Theatre at the time. Unlike the two double bills of Pinter’s plays mentioned above, the Royal Court Theatre double bill featured no premiere productions: Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes had seen their first performances in 1988 and 1996 (Pinter 2005a, 392; Pinter 2005c, 250). We may assume that quite a few of the people who came to see the Royal Court Theatre double bill had read somewhere about those two pieces being counted as among the more “political” (Aragay 2009, 283) of Pinter’s plays. Furthermore, whereas the Royal Shakespeare Company double bill had been directed by Hall (Pinter 1997a, 166; Pinter 1997b, 190), whose approach to Pinter’s stage directions we have already looked at, and the Almeida Theatre double bill had had Pinter as its director (Pinter 2005b, 438), the Royal Court Theatre double bill was directed by Katie Mitchell, a newcomer to commercial productions of Pinter’s plays (see Lee and Cornford 2020). Curiously enough, Mitchell’s directorial career since the Royal Court Theatre double bill has not featured Pinter’s plays, which cuts a stark contrast to her long-standing dedication to working on dramatic and other kinds of pieces by Samuel Beckett (Lee and Cornford 2020). Books and academic essays on Mitchell hardly refer to the Royal Court Theatre double bill (see, for example, Fowler 2019; Fowler 2020). Still, in an interview for Ian Smith’s Pinter in the Theatre, Mitchell puts Beckett and Pinter side by side, asserting that the two playwrights “lack”—or even “abhor”—what she would term as “sentimentality”, that they have a kind of “rigour” and “bleakness” in common (Mitchell 2005, 191). Mitchell in the interview also empathises with a “political” Pinter:

A year and a half ago I did Euripides, and I felt there was a similar sort of toughness—[Euripides and Pinter are] both hard-nosed political writers. Also, to be near someone who has those ideas is fantastically reassuring. Everything else is slightly slipping and slidy and ambivalent, and [Pinter] writes plays which directly express his convictions. And he takes no prisoners. (197)

Analysing the Royal Court Theatre double bill therefore means that I delineate Mitchell and other members of the company having put some of Pinter’s “theatrical strategies” into practice. I will keep in mind that, while being “hailed as the closest thing British theatre has to a genuine auteur” (Oltermann 2014), Mitchell has also been censured by a critic like Billington precisely for “assuming the mantle of an auteur” (Higgins 2016).

Archival sound recordings

Ricarda Franzen (2016, 313) asks, “[H]ow can one discuss historical theatre sound through sound recording, given that it captures only one dimension of performance?” This simple and yet crucial question can be broken down into three aspects as far as my analysis of the Royal Court Theatre double bill is concerned. First, I do not intend to regard the “one dimension” problem as a stumbling block. If there is a video recording of the double bill, I have no access to it. Materials available for research are a pair of sound-only recordings—a monophonic and unedited recording of the performance of Mountain Language at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs on 2 July 2001 and that of the performance of Ashes to Ashes in the same auditorium on the same date. The recordings are archived in the British Library in CD-R format; we are allowed access to the transferred mp3 versions on the SoundServer system in the British Library buildings. Second, I should always remember that a sound recording is an entity in its own right. As Ross Brown points out,

The trouble with sound-recording as a mode of documentation in theatre is that the sound design and other background ambience, like Andy Warhol’s friends in Max’s Kansas City [a club in New York City], come out too prevalently and noticeably in the mix. One does not get a document of the programme in context, but of programme and context with equal weighting. (Brown 2010, 130)

In other words, what recording devices pick up may not necessarily be what our ears are sensitive to. Finally, I am fully aware that listening to a sound recording for analysis sets itself apart from experiencing sound in a performance of a play. On the premise that “the act of listening is caught somewhere in between absolute focus and inattention” (Kendrick 2017, 65), Lynne Kendrick defines auditory “attention” in a theatrical environment as “an act of an audience” (64; original emphasis) and writes,

We do not necessarily attend to that which is intended to be the subject of our focus. This is not just a fending off of distractive elements within the field; rather, audience is also a movement between attention and its context, which requires a particular effort and an interplay between audition and focus, something which sound producers are acutely aware of. (64; original emphasis)

As a listener to the recordings of the performances of Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes, I deliberately “attend to” all the sounds which I can hear; at the same time, I try to imagine myself being a member of the audience at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs. My analysis will utilise detailed notes, taken from repeated listening to the recordings, on speech sounds, sound effects, and any other kind of sound, for example, actors interacting with props noisily or members of the audience laughing.

The essay will attempt to answer the following two questions: In what manners do sounds in the recording of Mountain Language and those in the recording of Ashes to Ashes relate to one another?; and what is the significance of the Royal Court Theatre double bill at the crossroads of Pinter, performance, and sound? Before starting to analyse the recordings, I will survey the kind of soundscape which would have enveloped people visiting the Royal Court Theatre in June-July 2001.

The Royal Court Theatre

The Royal Court Theatre stands on the south-east corner of Sloane Square in Chelsea in London. “One of the most characteristic experiences of modernity”, according to Patricia Pye in her Sound and Modernity in the Literature of London, 1880-1918, “is a sense of isolation within the crowd, and allied to this may be the auditory perception of blended noises” (Pye 2017, xvii). Finding myself in the south-east corner of Sloane Square today and listening to sounds around me, I am aware that my “perception of blended noises” is conditioned by the topography of the area; I can also tell from my experience that the kind of “blended noises” around the Royal Court Theatre has not changed greatly in the last two decades. Row after row of townhouses dominate Chelsea as a whole; shops lining the main streets are quaint and small in size. Buildings on Sloane Square itself, however, are robust and taller, including the Royal Court Theatre building. The Square, in effect, is walled in by the façades of those buildings; they reflect and amplify the “noise” of the traffic coming in and going out of the Square. People who come to see a performance at the Royal Court Theatre hang around near the entrance to the building; many of them stand on the pavement and chat to their friends or family members. Next to the Royal Court Theatre is a tube station without a roof over the rails; even though the trains are not visible from the Square, their comings and goings are yet another source of “noise”. Together, all those sounds are undeniably “modern”, after Pye. We should not forget, at the same time, that by “a sense of isolation” Pye means people not being conscious of their involvement in the sustenance of the “modern” soundscape: “The urban dweller hears the crowd, not the individual, and finds it correspondingly hard to imagine that they are making their own contribution to the din” (xvii). I will return to this point at the end of the essay.

In a metaphysical sense, the name Harold Pinter has not always rung in consonance with the Royal Court Theatre. Pinter may have left a strong impression on us when he played the role of Krapp in the 2006 Royal Court Theatre production of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (Billington 2006a), and yet we remember that the Royal Court Theatre had once been a venue and company with “[n]o [r]oom” for plays by Pinter (Waters 2021, 111–12). Steve Waters contends that the feeling had been mutual: being averse to “sacrificing […] the self for the unity of the theatrical moment” which emerged from the Royal Court Theatre in the 1950s, Pinter had probably never “sent his plays” to the company (111).¹ Indeed, it was as recent as 1996 that the Royal Court Theatre premiered a Pinter play for the first time—the piece was Ashes to Ashes, and Pinter directed the production for the Theatre Upstairs, the other of the two theatres in the Royal Court Theatre at the time (Pinter 2005a, 392; Waters 2021, 112).² We might also point to a locational twist to the occasion. The actual venue for the production was not the Theatre Upstairs in the Royal Court Theatre building on Sloane Square but the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End (Pinter 2005a, 392). Billington in his review reports that “[a] beguiling wraparound 140-seat space has been created from the Circle of the old Ambassadors” (Billington 1996), while Sheridan Morley, writing for the Spectator, comments on the venue being surreal:

This great and greatly disturbing drama [Ashes to Ashes] is to be found at the Ambassadors, one of the two West End theatres (the other being the Duke of York’s) which the Royal Court company are temporarily occupying while the builders are remodelling their usual Sloane Square home. But in a fit of ludicrous megalomania the Court are actually putting their name up in neon over these historic theatres […][,] thereby causing infinite confusion among tourists and cab drivers, since the theatres will naturally revert to their real names anyway next summer. (Morley 1996)

In more ways than one, then, it was for those who came to see the performances of Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs in June-July 2001 to find out how those plays fared in that venue.

Analysis and discussion

How the double bill begins

Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes were performed in that order in the Royal Court Theatre double bill—the sequence would duly have reminded each member of the audience that the premiere of Mountain Language had taken place eight years prior to that of Ashes to Ashes. Still, there is no inherent reason why any two theatrical pieces by a single author should be put on—as a double bill—in the order they were written or first produced. As we will see, Mitchell, along with the sound designer for the Royal Court Theatre double bill, Gareth Fry (Fry 2019, 182), gave an auditory justification to the Mountain Language-Ashes to Ashes sequence.

Scene 1 in Mountain Language begins as follows in the Faber edition:

A line of women. An ELDERLY WOMAN, cradling her hand. A basket at her feet. A YOUNG WOMAN with her arm around the [ELDERLY] WOMAN’s shoulders.

A SERGEANT enters, followed by an OFFICER. The SERGEANT points to the YOUNG WOMAN.

SERGEANT. Name!

YOUNG WOMAN. We’ve given our names. (Pinter 2005c, 251)

The indication of the characters’ whereabouts is given by the title of the scene, “A Prison Wall” (251). The opening stage directions do not hint at any kind of sound effects. On their part, Fry and Mitchell decided that a set of sound effects should introduce the audience to Mountain Language, a play which the sound designer and the director saw as “a study of oppression”, where “[p]risoners are being interrogated, hassled by guard dogs and tortured” on- and off-stage (Fry 2019, 182). Fry reminisces about the intention behind the set of sound effects which he and Mitchell came up with:

It is a short play, only about 20 minutes long, so you don’t have time to ramp up to the bleakness within the text. Rather than have a gentle fade-out of the house lights, we snapped the lights to complete black-out whilst simultaneously snapping into loud recordings of dogs barking, a helicopter buzzing overhead and the sound of soldiers. Members of the audience screamed at this jump-shock, but it had the desired effect of catapulting the audience into the show, a bit dazed and confused. (182)

The archival recording of Mountain Language captures a general rambling of the audience in the pre-performance auditorium; there is no music to prepare the audience for the performance to come; neither are there any pre-performance sound effects; all of a sudden, the ear-splitting sound of a dog barking and the roaring sound of a low-flying helicopter break violently into the chatter of the audience; for about four seconds, the sound of the helicopter overwhelms all the other sounds in the auditorium, almost as if a real helicopter has shattered the soundscape around the Royal Court Theatre and entered the airspace right above where the audience are seated (Mountain Language 2001, 00’00”-01’56”).³

According to Fry, he and Mitchell wanted to make the audience “dazed and confused” for a specific reason: “The prisoners in the play are equally dazed and confused by the oppression and cruelty they are facing, so we created a sympathy between the audience and the prisoners” (Fry 2019, 182). It seems that, to destabilise the audience corporeally, Fry and Mitchell found it imperative to manipulate the sound of the helicopter to a disproportionate extent. Karin Bijsterveld in Soundscapes of the Urban Past describes how “sounds may acquire a narrative iconicity” (Bijsterveld 2013, 15):

For example, the sounds of arriving coaches and cars, of door bells ringing, of doorsteps and wheels crunching the gravel have come to signify shifts in plots and scenes in a canonised manner. A similar example is the routine representation of landing airplanes in films through the sound of the screeching of wheels touching the tarmac. (15)

The audience in the Royal Court Theatre double bill would have been accustomed to “narrative iconicity” of that kind—they would immediately have identified the sound of a helicopter as such. If members of the audience were to quasi-experience what some of the characters in the play had been and would be subjected to, the sound of a helicopter per se could not have been sufficient.

No respite from sound effects

Pinter, writes Taylor-Batty, “expand[ed] the palette of writing for the stage beyond character and narrative” (Taylor-Batty 2014, 191). We might argue that, in the Royal Court Theatre double bill, the audience were pre-empted from coming to grips with what could lie “beyond character and narrative”, which—had it not been for the kind of sound effects provided by Mitchell and Fry—they would have been encouraged to do by following the performances of Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes scene by scene and line by line. Destabilising the audience corporeally even before any character uttered a single word, the director and the sound designer seemed to outstrip Pinter’s play-texts. What happened next?

In the archival recording, the sound of the helicopter starts receding, while the dog continues barking; a male voice shouts abuse, which is not in Pinter’s play-text, amidst the diminishing sound of the helicopter; the barking of the dog then starts fading away; the sounds of the helicopter and the dog barking are eventually folded into very faint ambient sound, over which is heard the above-quoted exchange of lines between the Sergeant and the Young Woman (ML 2001, 01’56”-02’26”). Mitchell mentions low-volume sound effects briefly in her book The Director’s Craft: A Handbook for the Theatre, which was published in 2009: “You can play the sound at a very low level so that it works subliminally on the audience” (Mitchell 2009, 86). In one respect, what happened during the first two and a half minutes in the Royal Court Theatre double bill was as simple as the sound engineer “lowering the volume” (Lysaker 2019, 89) of a set of sounds. John T. Lysaker in his book on Brian Eno’s ambient music writes,

Sounds generated through tape loops can function in an ambient manner, but so can music written, performed, and recorded in the most traditional manner. Analogously, one can play most recordings of traditionally composed and performed classical or even rock music in an ambient fashion simply by lowering the volume. (89)

In another respect, Fry and Mitchell’s intention would have been that the audience should be kept on their toes—the sounds of the helicopter and the dog barking, while having taken a nosedive to reach a near bottom of the range of volumes, would continue to ruffle the audience’s nerves, if “subliminally”.

And surely enough, the archival recording tells me that the sound of the helicopter emerges from the ambient zone about 25 seconds later (ML 2001, 02’44”). In the play-text, the Officer takes over the Sergeant and bombards the Young Woman with questions, which culminates in a rant about “dogs” and a “name” (Pinter 2005c, 253–54):

OFFICER. Look at this woman’s hand. I think the thumb is going to come off. (To ELDERLY WOMAN) Who did this?

She stares at him.

Who did this?

YOUNG WOMAN. A big dog.

OFFICER. What was his name?

Pause.

What was his name?

Pause.

Every dog has a name! They answer to their name. They are given a name by their parents and that is their name, that is their name! Before they bite, they state their name. It’s a formal procedure. They state their name and then they bite. What was his name? If you tell me one of our dogs bit this woman without giving his name I will have that dog shot!

Silence.

Now—attention! Silence and attention! Sergeant! (253–54; original emphases)

The stage direction “Silence” is the first of the many “Silence”s in the Faber edition of Mountain Language. We remember Hall’s definition of Pinter’s “Silence”, that it suggests “an extreme crisis point”—the Officer’s rant about “dogs” and a “name”, which immediately precedes the direction “Silence”, seems to validate Hall’s claim. The archival recording tells me that Fry and Mitchell chose to use the first “Silence” in the play as a cue for the volume of the sound of the helicopter to be turned up further: for about 15 seconds following the Officer’s rant, the sound of the helicopter gets louder and louder (ML 2001, 04’08”-23”). It seems that Fry and Mitchell expected the audience to relive the kind of corporeal disturbance which they had gone through at the beginning of the performance. In the archival recording, the sound of the helicopter then starts receding, over which the Officer utters the line “Now—attention! Silence and attention!” (ML 2001, 04’23”-36”). On the page, the Officer using the word “silence” as part of his command is ironic since it directly follows the stage direction “Silence”. The irony acquired another dimension in the Royal Court Theatre double bill, with the volume of the sound of the helicopter having just reached a maximum. The archival recording tells me that the sound of the helicopter continues receding and is finally folded back into the ambient sound; for the remainder of scene 1, the ambient sound does not cease (ML 2001, 04’36”-07’42”). In short, the audience were offered no complete respite from sound effects.

There are three other scenes in Mountain Language, entitled “Visitors Room”, “Voice in the Darkness”, and “Visitors Room” (Pinter 2005c, 258, 262, 265). The archival recording shows that those scenes all emulate the arrangement of sound effects which I have analysed so far: each scene starts with a set of sound effects at an ear-shattering volume; the sound effects are then reduced to become part of ambient sound; they emerge from the ambient zone temporarily from time to time. We can, for example, look at scene 2, which opens as follows in the play-text:

A PRISONER sitting. The ELDERLY WOMAN sitting, with basket. A GUARD standing behind her.

The PRISONER and the [ELDERLY] WOMAN speak in a strong rural accent.

Silence.

ELDERLY WOMAN. I have bread—

The GUARD jabs her with a stick.

GUARD. Forbidden. Language forbidden. (258)

The Elderly Woman is the Prisoner’s mother. In the archival recording, the scene starts with the sounds of synthesised, steam-engine-like beats at a top volume, with the shrill of an alarm accompanying them; the sounds culminate in a massive bang, which resonates and is followed by a stream of synthesised knocking sounds, again, at a maximum volume; the repeated knocking gathers tempo; there then is a synthesised sound of the turning of a heavy key, which leads to a synthesised sound of a heavy, sliding door being drawn back; a complex mixture of synthesised sounds gains momentum until it culminates in another massive bang; there are reverberations of that bang; the reverberations fade away, leaving some breezy, slightly resonant ambient sound to be audible; the Elderly Woman’s first line is uttered over the ambient sound, and so are the Guard’s first three words (ML 2001, 07’42”-08’29”). A few lines down in the play-text, the Guard repeats his admonition in a heated manner: “Forbidden! Forbidden forbidden forbidden [sic]! Jesus Christ! (To PRISONER) Does she understand what I’m saying?” (Pinter 2005c, 259). In the archival recording, the Guard pounds on the table and fiercely chants the word “forbidden”; as if to back him up, the ambient sound increases in volume (ML 2001, 08’56”-09’03”). We will see later in the essay that the production of Ashes to Ashes also employed sound effects in such a manner that they might affect the audience “subliminally” or overtly corporeally.

Voiceovers

The play-text of Mountain Language does not indicate any of the sound effects which my analysis has focused on so far. At times, however, Pinter’s “theatrical strategies” are evident through stage directions for how some of the characters’ lines should sound. Towards the end of scene 2 and in the middle of scene 3 in Mountain Language are moments when characters do not move on the stage—“The figures are still” (Pinter 2005c, 260, 263)—and verbal utterances proceed as “[v]oices over” (260, 263). Here is how the voiceover sequence in the middle of scene 3 begins:

[HOODED] MAN’S VOICE. I watch you sleep. And then your eyes open. You look up at me above you and smile.

YOUNG WOMAN’S VOICE. You smile. When my eyes open I see you above me and smile. (263)

The Hooded Man and the Young Woman are husband and wife. Taylor-Batty uses the word “fantasy” when he discusses the voiceover sequences in the two scenes:

As [in the middle of scene 3] the lights dim to half and the brutal image of the hooded man set across the stage from his terrified wife freezes still, we hear the two of them speak to each other in a voice-over. Their voices recall being out on a boat in spring, and the repeated, shared memory of her waking to see him watching her […]. The previous fantasy sequence [towards the end of scene 2] occurs in the first meeting between the prisoner and his mother. […] Theatrically, the sequences serve to illicit [sic] our sympathy in a quite blatant manner: they foreground the persecuted characters’ humanity against a background of dehumanising suffering. (Taylor-Batty 2014, 155)

According to Taylor-Batty, the voiceovers are “aspirational”—the audience in any production of Mountain Language would have to acknowledge, while wishing for the contrary, “[t]he impossibility of [the described] encounters” between the Hooded Man and the Young Woman and between the Prisoner and the Elderly Woman (155). How, then, did Mitchell and Fry put the stage direction “[v]oices over” into practice? The archival recording tells me that the director and the sound designer decided to scale up the playwright’s instructions: every single word in the voiceover dialogues is heard in low whispers (ML 2001, 10’45”-11’01”, 12’17”-34”). Importantly, the four actors produced genuine whispers rather than so-called “stage whispers”, and that doubly foregrounded the nature of voiceover technique—in any theatre, it would be with the help of amplifying devices and loudspeakers that members of the audience could hear the actors’ genuine whispers.

Mitchell has occasionally turned to the combination of genuine whispers and loudspeakers in the course of her directorial career. For the 2006 National Theatre production of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, Mitchell set the narrative “in the early 1930s” (Billington 2006b), where the entertainment devised by Konstantin for his family and friends showcased “Nina whispering her words into a microphone” (Billington 2006b). Declaring that, under Mitchell’s direction, “theatrical effect t[ook] precedence over everything”, Billington in his review dismisses the “virtually inaudible” play-within-the-play (Billington 2006b). When I saw a performance of that production in the Lyttelton Theatre, Nina’s whispered speech did not strike me as being “inaudible” in any sense of the term; what I had to do was to adjust my ears to the sound of genuine whispers coming through the loudspeakers, which meant that I listened to Nina’s speech more attentively than I would have done if the actor playing Nina had spoken in a normal manner. The same, I would argue, was true for members of the audience during the voiceover sequences in Mountain Language in the Royal Court Theatre double bill—the whispers would have required concentration on the part of the audience. At the same time, there is a key difference between Nina’s whispers in The Seagull and the whispers as voiceovers in Mountain Language. Whereas the former, despite Billington, could have been interpreted by any member of the audience as a representation of Konstantin desperately trying to be cutting edge in his creative endeavour, the latter would have made sense to the audience so long as they knew that they were privy to what each of the four characters thought and felt. The question of whispers will also arise when I analyse the archival recording of Ashes to Ashes.

From one play to the other

In the Royal Court Theatre double bill, Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes were performed with no interval (Macaulay 2001). Mitchell and Fry took it upon themselves to force the audience, as it were, to accept an instant transition from a performance of one play to that of the other. I will analyse a series of sounds which drew Mountain Language to a close and prompted Ashes to Ashes to begin.

Scene 3 in Mountain Language having taken place in a “corridor” (Pinter 2005c, 262), the final scene in the play is set in the visitors’ room again. The Guard tells the Prisoner, who “sits trembling”, that the Elderly Woman “can speak in her own language” now (265). The archival recording tells me that the Prisoner starts talking to the Elderly Woman calmly in their “own language”; he gets no verbal reaction from her; adopting an encouraging intonation, he tells his mother that she “can speak”; he still fails to get a word out of her; the Prisoner, in an increasingly “trembling” voice, repeatedly asks his mother to say something; ambient sound is noticeable each time the mother refuses to open her mouth; in the end, the Prisoner’s urging acquires an almost accusatory intonation (ML 2001, 14’34”-15’29”). The Prisoner eventually “falls from the chair on to his knees, begins to gasp and shake violently” (Pinter 2005c, 267), which indicates that he, like his mother, has lost the capacity to produce any speech sounds. It would have dawned on the audience in the Royal Court Theatre double bill that whispers might have been the only means by which the two characters could possibly speak their minds. The play-text of Mountain Language ends with the Sergeant making a derogatory comment on the “shaking” Prisoner (267). In the archival recording, the Sergeant’s final line is followed by a set of sound effects which resembles what was heard at the beginning of scene 2: there is a synthesised sound of a heavy, sliding door being drawn back; it is followed by a complex mixture of synthesised sounds, which gains momentum and culminates in a massive bang; there are reverberations of that bang (ML 2001, 15’53”-16’06”).

The archival recording tells me that the sound effects did not stop there: the reverberations of the bang dissipate, leaving the ambient sound to continue humming; the sound gets louder, thus ceasing to be “ambient” in the true sense of the term; from that emerges the sound of the helicopter, which has not been heard since scene 1; the volume of the sound of the helicopter reaches a maximum level as it did in scene 1 and then starts decreasing; what used to be the ambient sound, on the other hand, gets louder and louder (ML 2001, 16’06”-52”). Listening to the sound of the helicopter, the audience would have been led to think—if for a fraction of a second—that the play was starting all over again, that the narrative was cyclical. By designing the sound effects in that manner, Mitchell and Fry seem to have foretold what the playwright was to tell the world in his Nobel lecture four years later, in 2005. Referring to Mountain Language, one of the few plays of his which were mentioned in the lecture, Pinter reiterated that the play was not a play but a fact of life in some parts of the world: “Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern repeated over and over again, on and on, hour after hour” (Pinter 2007, 433). The archival recording shows that all the sound effects are then wiped off, in an instant and without a trace (ML 2001, 16’52”).

I would have imagined that the sound of the helicopter was still ringing in the audience’s ears. Mitchell and Fry, however, did not leave the audience alone. The archival recording tells me that the auditorium is immediately filled with the sounds of birds chirping—a total transformation of soundscape (ML 2001, 16’52”-59”). The audience would have been baffled by an auditory idyll into which they were being ushered unceremoniously—and that, we may speculate, was part of Fry and Mitchell’s intention. At the same time, we note that the setting of Ashes to Ashes is laid out in the Faber edition as

A house in the country.

Ground-floor room. A large window.Garden beyond.

Two armchairs. Two lamps.

Early evening. Summer. (Pinter 2005a, 393)

What the director and the sound designer did was to bring the bucolic setting indicated in the play-text to the fore.

Double casting

We might be tempted to suggest that it would be difficult for any production of Ashes to Ashes to keep the audience attuned to the performance: there are no scene divisions in Ashes to Ashes, which contrasts with Mountain Language utilising its four scenes to utmost effect; Ashes to Ashes has only two characters in it, while Mountain Language is an ensemble-orientated play; when performed on the stage, Ashes to Ashes lasts twice as long as Mountain Language does. On their part, though, Pinter scholars point out that the characters’ lines and the stage directions are multifaceted, grammatically as well as semantically, in the play-text of Ashes to Ashes. Elisabeth Angel-Perez, for example, proposes a “rhizomatic juxtaposition of different levels of reading” (Angel-Perez 2009, 145). According to Angel-Perez, there are three “[s]uperimposed layers of meaning” (145) in Ashes to Ashes: the first layer, “the parody of a comedy of manners”, has partly to do with the pair of armchairs and lamps on the stage initiating “a systematic antagonistic positioning in space, two ways of looking at the same object, two points of view” (145); another layer, “a political parable or allegory” (146), involves a person who is described by one of the characters in the play, Rebecca, as her “lover” (Pinter 2005a, 414) and whose words and deeds as remembered and related by Rebecca are such that Angel-Perez calls him “[t]he executioner [who] only exists as a synecdoche through the image of his fist” (Angel-Perez 2009, 146); the final layer, “Ashes to Ashes as a Shoah play”, is intrinsic to the very title of the play, Ashes to Ashes, which not only hints at some kind of “crematorium” but also includes all the letters that spell out “Shoah” (148). I will argue that, when it came to the Royal Court Theatre double bill, “layers of meaning” in Ashes to Ashes—not exclusively in Angel-Perez’s sense—were discerned by members of the audience as they made connections between what they were listening to and what they remembered having listened to during the performance of Mountain Language.

The opening stage directions and the first batch of dialogues between Devlin, the other character in the play, and Rebecca—they “live” together (Pinter 2005a, 424) in the “house in the country”—read as follows:

DEVLIN standing with drink. REBECCA sitting.

Silence.

REBECCA. Well … for example … he would stand over me and clench his fist. And then he’d put his other hand on my neck and grip it and bring my head towards him. His fist … grazed my mouth. And he’d say, “Kiss my fist”.

DEVLIN. And did you?

REBECCA. Oh yes. I kissed his fist. The knuckles. And then he’d open his hand and give me the palm of his hand … to kiss … which I kissed.

Pause.

And then I would speak.

DEVLIN. What did you say? You said what? What did you say?

Pause.

REBECCA. I said, “Put your hand round my throat”. I murmured it through his hand, as I was kissing it, but he heard my voice, he heard it through his hand, he felt my voice in his hand, he heard it there.

Silence. (395–96)

In the archival recording of Ashes to Ashes, the sounds of birds chirping are joined by some synthesised wind-like sound, which slowly gets louder; all the sounds are then turned down in volume to the extent that they become ambient sound; it takes another 25 seconds for Rebecca to utter her very first word, “Well”, which means that the first “Silence” in the play-text is here realised as the permeation of ambient sound (Ashes to Ashes 2001, 00’06”-01’59”).⁴ Rebecca and Devlin’s dialogue proceeds, during which the chirping of birds continues to be heard, albeit just barely (AA 2001, 01’59”-04’12”). Mitchell, we note, double cast the principal roles in the Royal Court Theatre double bill: Anastasia Hille played the Young Woman in Mountain Language and Rebecca in Ashes to Ashes, while Neil Dudgeon was the Sergeant in the former and Devlin in the latter (Macaulay 2001). The archival recordings tell me that the two actors adopt a slightly Cockney-like accent while performing in Mountain Language (ML 2001, 02’20”-07’42”, 11’37”-13’14”) and replace it with Received Pronunciation when starting to play their roles in Ashes to Ashes (AA 2001, 01’59”-43’57”). Angel-Perez asserts that Rebecca and Devlin make a “parod[ied]” version of female-male pairs in a play like Betrayal, which represents “the bourgeois universe of Pinter’s middle life period” (Angel-Perez 2009, 145). We may speculate that, in the Royal Court Theatre double bill, Mitchell and the two actors drew on the clichéd association of Received Pronunciation with the upper-middle classes. The archival recording of Ashes to Ashes also shows that, in the first batch of dialogues, Hille’s Rebecca sounds calm and somewhat dreamy—while her intonation is rich, Rebecca does not betray much emotion, be it anger, frustration, contentment, or happiness (AA 2001, 01’59”-04’12”). On the other hand, Dudgeon’s Devlin sounds nervous in the archival recording, especially when he asks the three “what” questions (AA 2001, 03’12”-14”). The person whom Rebecca refers to by the pronoun “he”—her “lover”, as it will turn out later—is conspicuous by his absence, the verbal exchange between he and Rebecca being embedded in the sentences which the latter utters. In the archival recording, Hille’s Rebecca neither impersonates her lover when she uses the direct speech, “Kiss my fist”, nor intones distinguishingly the other direct speech, “Put your hand round my throat”, which is what she said to her lover—Rebecca and her lover are seamlessly integrated with each other in Hille’s verbal rendition, and that might explain Devlin’s nervousness (AA 2001, 02’35”, 03’27”-30”).

The audience would have wondered who or what Devlin could be. We remember that the Sergeant in Mountain Language showers abuse on the Young Woman, her husband, the Elderly Woman, and her son—in the archival recording, Dudgeon as the Sergeant keeps shouting at other characters (ML 2001). Put another way, the Sergeant may be regarded as a stock character. By contrast, Eckart Voigts describes Devlin as “a man […] who might or might not be [Rebecca’s] doctor, therapist, partner, interrogator or torturer” (Voigts 2021, 80). The description seems to apply well to how Mitchell directed Dudgeon in the production of Ashes to Ashes—the archival recording shows that Devlin always sounds a little too agitated to pass himself off as any of the figures listed by Voigts (AA 2001). Even when, towards the end of the play, Devlin suddenly becomes Rebecca’s lover and utters the lines “Kiss my fist”, “Speak. Say it. Say ‘Put your hand round my throat’”, and “Ask me to put my hand round your throat” (Pinter 2005a, 428), Dudgeon’s rendition expresses desperation rather than repression (AA 2001, 39’59”-40’29”).

On her part, Rebecca seems to “undermine and disorient Devlin” throughout the play by taking advantage of “the misogynist commonplace that women love to be dominated” (Milne 2009, 246). Her words and deeds, along with what female characters say and do in such Pinter plays as A slight Ache and The Lover, are identified by Drew Milne as a problem:

The most profound disturbance seems to come from the idea of women accepting the role of whore and then demanding to be recognised as such. The whore seems to persist as a dramatic trope throughout Pinter’s work, but the reasons for this remain ambiguous. Either these dramatic forms of misogyny are understood as particular pathologies of misrecognition and perverted sexual fantasy, or as structural generalisations about the disturbing assumptions of power in male-female relationships. Either way, male-defined power remains structural. (246)

What about the Young Woman in Mountain Language? “[T]he disturbing assumptions of power in male-female relationships” are undeniably apparent in Mountain Language, while they do not take the kind of form which we find in plays like Ashes to Ashes, A Slight Ache, and The Lover. The Young Woman is a far cry from Rebecca, Flora in A Slight Ache, and Sarah in The Lover in that, instead of living comfortably as those women do in the countryside or the suburbs (Pinter 1991, 153; Pinter 1996, 148–49), she finds herself in a “place” where speaking the “mountain language” has been “outlawed” by “military decree” (Pinter 2005c, 255–56). In scene 1 in Mountain Language, the Young Woman confronts some military personnel: she makes a “complaint” on behalf of all the women who have been made to stand for hours by the prison wall (254), tells the Sergeant that she herself is not a speaker of the “mountain language” (256), and asserts her “right” to “see [her] husband” (257); every time the Young Woman says something, she is treated contemptuously either by the Sergeant or the Officer (251–57); towards the end of the scene, the Sergeant starts mocking the Young Woman with sexual innuendos (256). In scene 3, the Young Woman expresses her willingness to give herself to one of the members of the prison authorities so that “everything [will] be all right” with her husband, whom the Guard has just “drag[ged] […] off” (264). The archival recording tells me that, confronting the Sergeant and the Officer in scenes 1 and 3, Hille as the Young Woman speaks slowly, calmly, and resolutely (ML 2001, 02’24”-07’12”, 12’35”-13’12”). When she cries out on one occasion, Hille is simply faithful to the stage direction “The YOUNG WOMAN screams”, which immediately follows the direction “The HOODED MAN [her husband] collapses” (Pinter 2005c, 263; ML 2001, 12’35”). Under Mitchell’s direction, Hille’s Young Woman worked as a harbinger of the actor’s rendition of Rebecca, which I will analyse further in the next subsection.

“You were talking about some kind of atrocity”

Ashes to Ashes may be “a Shoah play”, to borrow Angel-Perez’s term again. Other scholars and critics, including Billington, place the narrative of the play in a “landscape” (Billington 2007, 382) which is more like a historical as well as geographical palimpsest: “We seem to be in the English shires and yet in Auschwitz, Bosnia or any one of a score of places where atrocities became, or indeed still are, part of the landscape” (Billington 2007, 382). As for the Royal Court Theatre double bill, the archival recording tells me that the barely audible chirping of birds and the faint, synthesised wind-like sound are sustained throughout the performance of Ashes to Ashes (AA 2001). “Subliminally” or not, the audience would have heard those sounds as the grain against which everything else in the performance should go.

We detect a first hint of the Shoah, or the “landscape” in the sense above, when Rebecca starts to reminisce about being shown around “a kind of factory” by her lover (Pinter 2005a, 404). She tells Devlin that the “workpeople” (405) in the factory

had total faith in him [her lover]. They respected his … purity, his … conviction. They would follow him over a cliff and into the sea, if he asked them, he said. And sing in a chorus, as long as he led them. They were in fact very musical, he said. (405)

Rebecca provides Devlin with more fragments of what she remembers about the tour of the factory, including that she “looked everywhere” for the bathroom and “never found out where it was” (406). In the archival recording, Hille’s Rebecca keeps intoning her lines richly throughout the factory anecdote—that, however, does not expose the character’s emotions, just as the rich intonation employed by Hille at the opening of the performance of the play did not (AA 2001, 09’43”-12’10”).

Crucially, Rebecca in the play-text then departs from the factory anecdote and gives Devlin another piece of information about her lover: “He used to go to the local railway station and walk down the platform and tear all the babies from the arms of their screaming mothers” (Pinter 2005a, 406–07). The archival recording shows that Hille utters the sentence in a manner which is still devoid of any distinctive emotions (AA 2001, 12’13”-23”). Among the members of the audience, there must have been some who found the seeming incongruity perplexing—the archival recording captures a few members of the audience reacting to Rebecca’s babies-and-mothers anecdote with a faint and brief laugh (AA 2001, 12'23”-31”). Other members of the audience most likely deemed the laughter inappropriate, and yet the archival recording also tells me that the reaction coming from those few is augmented by Dudgeon’s Devlin saying, “Did he?” (Pinter 2005a, 407), in a rather uncertain manner, which prompts more members of the audience to laugh (AA 2001, 12’31”-47”). About halfway into the performance of the play, Devlin brings the conversation back to Rebecca’s babies-and-mothers anecdote, using the word “atrocity” for the first and last time:

DEVLIN. […] Now let me say this. A little while ago you made … shall we say … you made a somewhat oblique reference to your bloke … your lover? … and babies and mothers, et cetera. And platforms. I inferred from this that you were talking about some kind of atrocity. Now let me ask you this. What authority do you think you yourself possess which would give you the right to discuss such an atrocity?

REBECCA. I have no such authority. Nothing has ever happened to me. Nothing has ever happened to any of my friends. I have never suffered. Nor have my friends.

DEVLIN. Good.

Pause. (Pinter 2005a, 413)

On the page, Rebecca’s response is definitive and mystifying at the same time: while admitting categorically that she is not in the position of “discuss[ing]” what Devlin has called “some kind of atrocity”, Rebecca seems to suggest that the “screaming mothers” could have been she and friends of hers. Turning to the archival recording, I find that Hille’s Rebecca answers Devlin’s question calmly and nonchalantly (AA 2001, 19’01”-17”). Dudgeon’s Devlin and members of the audience would have been left as bewildered as ever. Devlin wraps up the topic rather ambiguously with the single word “Good”, and the stage direction “Pause” which follows that word seems to validate Hall’s definition, “a moment of non-verbal tension”. Later on in the narrative, Rebecca navigates us back to the babies-and-mothers anecdote, this time making it plain that she not only witnessed the incident first-hand but had been besotted with her lover the perpetrator:

And my best friend, the man I had given my heart to, the man I knew was the man for me the moment we met, my dear, my most precious companion, I watched him walk down the platform and tear all the babies from the arms of their screaming mothers. (Pinter 2005a, 418–19)

In the archival recording, Hille’s Rebecca once again sounds reassuringly calm when she utters that long sentence (AA 2001, 27’51”-28’13”). Devlin does not utter a word in reaction to Rebecca’s now more personalised anecdote (Pinter 2005a, 419)—the stage direction “Silence” follows her speech (419), which suggests that Devlin’s state of mind is at “an extreme crisis point”, after Hall.

To Mireia Aragay, Rebecca is a character who “ultimately comes to embody the claim that [[n]ot having actually experienced any atrocities herself] is no excuse for opting out of the harsh reality of human suffering, or indeed for disclaiming responsibility” (Aragay 2009, 291). Aragay cites two names from Pinter’s plays—including the Young Woman in Mountain Language—as characters who prefigure Rebecca by choosing not to “evade responsibility” (291). On the other hand, claiming that “Pinter’s plays remain complicit with the misogynist structures of sexual difference through which power is reproduced”, Milne is clear in his conclusion: “a critique of power” in Pinter’s plays does not equal “political articulation” (Milne 2009, 247). Interestingly enough, the archival recording of Ashes to Ashes tells me that Hille’s Rebecca sounds more emotional than she does at any other moment when, having described to Devlin how her sister Kim was cheated on by her husband, she says, “[Kim will] never have him back. Never. She says she’ll never share a bed with him again. Never. Ever” (Pinter 2005a, 422)—Hille as Rebecca enunciates the word “never” in such a manner that it almost seems as if Rebecca has momentarily become Kim (AA 2001, 30’22”-32”). Rebecca’s lines are followed by Devlin’s question, “Why not?” (Pinter 2005a, 422), which, in the archival recording, Dudgeon utters rather brusquely (AA 2001, 30’33”). We might be led to believe that Mitchell, if asked, would agree more with Milne’s interpretation of Pinter’s work than with Aragay’s. Overall, under Mitchell’s direction, Hille seemed to demonstrate to the audience where her Rebecca stood in “the misogynist structures of sexual difference” rather than represent Rebecca as a figure who would face “responsibility” for “human suffering”.

How the double bill ends

Ashes to Ashes draws to a close with Rebecca’s final anecdote, which, on the page, is fitted with the author’s stage direction “[t]here is an echo” (Pinter 2005a, 429). While not being on the list of characters in the play-text (391), Echo repeats the last few words in each of Rebecca’s phrases and sentences (429–33). Here is how the anecdote ends:

REBECCA. And I met a woman I knew

ECHO. I knew

REBECCA. And she said what happened to your baby

ECHO. your baby

REBECCA. Where is your baby

ECHO. your baby

REBECCA. And I said what baby

ECHO. what baby

REBECCA. I don’t have a baby

ECHO. a baby

REBECCA. I don’t know of any baby

ECHO. of any baby

Pause.

REBECCA. I don’t know of any baby

Long silence. (431–33)

In the Royal Court Theatre double bill, Mitchell and Fry chose not to be faithful to the playwright’s stage directions. The archival recording tells me that all the lines for Echo are heard in low whispers—the voice presumably being Hille’s—through the loudspeakers with no reverberation effect (AA 2001, 40’38”-43’57”). As has been pointed out by critics and scholars, including Billington (2007, 382), the interaction between Rebecca and Echo seems to draw on act 5 scene 3 in The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster, where some of the words which the characters Antonio and Delio utter are repeated by Echo, a voice coming from the Duchess of Malfi’s grave (Webster 1997, 321–22). Discussing the Webster play, Gina Bloom elaborates on Echo’s mythical aspect:

The echo in Webster’s play does not simply halt sounds, preventing them from penetrating a listener’s body; it throws sounds back to their producer, creating what appears to be an independent vocal act. The echo’s capacity to “speak” is precipitated by its capacity to “hear”, as hearing and speaking become two sides of the same disembodied vocal process, virtually indistinguishable from each another [sic]. (Bloom 2007, 160–61)

We may speculate that Mitchell and Fry wanted to free Echo of mythical as well as Websterian connotations—whispers replacing echoes would have been the director and the sound designer’s answer to the problem. I nevertheless suspect that the whispers hardly helped the audience make a narrative sense of Rebecca’s “hallucinatory” (Taylor-Batty 2014, 184) lines. It would have been more probable that, listening to Echo-turned-whispers in Rebecca’s final anecdote, the audience harked back to the four characters whispering their feelings as well as thoughts in scenes 2 and 3 in Mountain Language. Pinter referred to Rebecca as “a lost figure in a drowning landscape, […] unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others”, in his Nobel lecture (Pinter 2007, 433). We might assert that, by melding the playwright’s stage direction “[t]here is an echo” in Ashes to Ashes with his stage direction “[v]oices over” in Mountain Language, Mitchell and Fry forged an undercurrent which the Elderly Woman, the Prisoner, the Young Woman, the Hooded Man, and Rebecca were all part of. Still, in the archival recording, Hille’s Rebecca tells her final anecdote as quietly and calmly as ever—the character’s very last line, “I don’t know of any baby”, sounds slightly dreamlike (AA 2001, 40'38”-43'57”).

The stage direction “Long silence” wraps up Rebecca’s final anecdote, and the whole play, on the page. As far as members of the audience who filled the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs were concerned, the end of Ashes to Ashes also meant the double bill being brought to a close. The archival recording shows that the synthesised wind-like sound, which was first heard at the beginning of the play and became part of the ambient sound, gets slightly louder about 10 seconds after Rebecca’s final “I don’t know of any baby”; about 10 more seconds later, a loud synthesised note in a monotone joins the wind-like sound; all the sounds are prolonged for about 15 seconds; when they are wiped off, the audience start applauding (AA 2001, 43’57”-44’36”). Compared to the sound of the helicopter in the performance of Mountain Language, the synthesised note in a monotone would have struck the audience as being inexplicably conceptual and abstract. We can easily assume, on the other hand, that Mitchell and Fry’s intention was to affect the audience corporeally yet again and for the last time.

Reviewing the Royal Court Theatre double bill for the Financial Times, Alastair Macaulay is ambivalent about Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes being performed in succession: acknowledging that the double bill was compelling enough, with “[the first play] show[ing] scenes of savage political oppression not unlike those ‘recalled’ by Rebecca [in the second play]”, Macaulay nevertheless is of the opinion that Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes “shrink and lose many of their exciting ambiguities when they are played together” (Macaulay 2001). My analysis of the archival recordings of Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes supports Macaulay’s comments in that the soundscape which Fry, Mitchell, and the actors executed for Ashes to Ashes would have been experienced by the audience less for its own worth than in relation to the soundscape they remembered from Mountain Language. To Charles Spencer in his review for the Daily Telegraph, the double bill doubly foregrounded what he considers a flaw in Pinter’s “explicitly political” pieces: “Sketchy, paranoid and self-righteous, [Pinter’s political plays] strike me as the product of a dramatic imagination in steep decline” (Spencer 2001). That, however, should be interpreted alongside Spencer singing the praises, in the same review, of Mitchell, the sound design, and the acting (2001)—put another way, the critic recognises in Mitchell an “auteur”. It is abundantly clear from the analysis of the archival recordings that Mitchell, with Fry assisting her, assumed the auditory auteur-ship of both Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes. Sometimes, the auteur-director was far advanced in putting Pinter’s “theatrical strategies” into practice; other times, she seemed to leave problems as problems, a telling example of which being how “the misogynist structures of sexual difference” in Pinter’s work might be dealt with. Billington’s review for the Guardian has more to do with the difference which the critic found between the two productions, and his verdict is unequivocal: “Pinter’s focus on the arbitrary appropriation of language by the heavy-handed state is almost lost amid the scenic effects and tumultuous sound” in Mountain Language, while Ashes to Ashes “fares much better in Mitchell’s assured hands” (Billington 2001). According to Billington, the director turned the production of Mountain Language into something which “smack[ed] of police-state cliche [sic]” (2001). True, a good portion of the sound effects which I heard in the archival recording of Mountain Language, ranging from the sound of a helicopter to that of the turning of a heavy key, seemed reliant on the audience’s readiness for “narrative iconicity”. When it came to the speech sounds, the shouting Sergeant, for example, would certainly have fed into the audience’s stereotypes. And yet, it was not that the audience were released entirely from a cliché-ridden soundscape when the performance of Ashes to Ashes started. The chirping of birds being joined by some synthesised wind-like sound and becoming ambient sound would have been just as blatant an iconic signal to the audience—the difference was that, unlike in Mountain Language, the characters’ lines seemed to run counter to the iconic sounds.

Spencer, who found the double bill “interminable”, somewhat cynically writes, “By the time you stagger out into Sloane Square, you half expect to find bare trees and snow on the ground” (Spencer 2001). The “snow” refers to Rebecca remembering what she saw on her way to the “railway station”:

And the snow was a funny colour. It wasn’t white. Well, it was white but there were other colours in it. It was as if there were veins running through it. And it wasn’t smooth, as snow is, as snow should be. It was bumpy. (Pinter 2005a, 418)

I suspect that Mitchell, Fry, and the actors in the Royal Court Theatre double bill would have wanted each member of the audience to “stagger out into Sloane Square” and hear anew the “blended noises” outside, the “modern” soundscape around the Royal Court Theatre which I described in the introductory section. Having just experienced a succession of highly powerful and yet also infinitely subtle soundscapes in the Theatre Downstairs, people would have started walking along the pavement to realise that they had always been “making their own contribution to the din”, after Pye.

Acknowledgements

For their help, I am grateful to the staff in Sound at the British Library. I thank the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Naoko Yagi

Naoko Yagi is Professor of English in the School of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University and currently Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge. Her current research interests lie in twentieth-century English and Irish drama in production, especially, how speech sounds interact with other kinds of sound. She has co-edited three books, including Irish Theatre and Its Soundscapes (2015), and contributed chapters to books such as Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter (2009). Essays include “Laughter and the Audience: Krapp’s Last Tape in Performance” (2021) and “Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman in Two Archival Recordings” (2020). Having completed a BA and an MA at Sophia University, she obtained an MA and a PhD from the University of Warwick.

Notes

1. In his The Royal Court Theatre and the Modern Stage, Philip Roberts writes, “The modern British theatre was to look to modern continental European theatre for its contemporary masters, Beckett and [Bertolt] Brecht. The catholicity that has marked the [Royal] Court during its years was implicit in its beginning phase [the 1950s]. The mix, when it developed, placed the British theatre in the mainstream avant-garde of Europe” (1999, 57).

2. A sketch called The New World Order had opened at the Royal Court Theatre in 1991 (Billington 2007, 327–28).

3. In all subsequent parenthetical references to the recording of Mountain Language, the title of the play will be abbreviated to “ML”.

4. In all subsequent parenthetical references to the recording of Ashes to Ashes, the title of the play will be abbreviated to “AA”.