It has already been an excellent year for Britain’s greatest living dramatist, Harold Pinter, with Betrayal sold out at the Donmar.
The Hothouse, currently on at the National Theatre, is an early example of Pinter engaging with his signature themes of menace, suppression of freedom and deep-seated loathing of state power in the wrong hands. The Hothouse is a self-styled convalescent home funded by a mysterious Ministry and run by a terrible troop of damaged staff more institutionalised than the inmates. The action takes place on Christmas Day when the Hothouse’s governor, Colonel Roote, decides to get to the bottom of one patient’s death and the parentage of the baby born that morning to another.
It is clear that one or more of the staff – perhaps even the Colonel himself – are to blame. Murder and rape are discussed with wonderful and horrific humour by Roote and his razor sharp lieutenant, Mr Gibbs. Christmas Day and the search for the offender move on in a series of brutally pointed exchanges, punctured and punctuated by disembodied shrieks and groans from the patients. The increasingly sinister events in the play – such as the torture of Lamb, a keen staff member who was “a very popular boy at school” – are so well written that they remain very funny.
When the bloody end comes, the wrongness of the Hothouse is such that it does not matter which of the staff the culprit was. Every one of them and, by extension, anyone who tolerates injustice and abuse, is to blame.
Pinter wrote the play in 1958 but he did not stage it until 1980 when, in a Daily Telegraph interview, he said of it:
“I have a feeling that it’s more pertinent now than it might have been in 1958, when we didn’t know anything about the Russian psychiatric hospitals, did we? Now we do.”
The remarkable thing about Ian Rickson’s current production in the Lyttleton Theatre is that it is in no sense a trip either to the 1950s or the Cold War.
Corrupt, incompetent and downright murderous the staff of the Hothouse may be, but they too are victims of the hellish system they are caught up in. They inhabit a world in which patients are numbers not names and in which the blurring of work and life reaches even as far as Christmas Day. Rage and impotence are emotions common to anyone who has ever phoned a helpline in the frustrated hope of hearing a human voice. Murky suicides in army barracks, internment in island prison camps and rendition flights that may or may not have been “ministry” approved are all types of twenty first century Hothouse.
It is difficult to single out individuals for praise amidst strong performances. Paul Ritter (Lush) is particularly impressive in his handling of Pinter’s complex and dense speeches – no picnic for an actor – and his scenes with Stephen Moore (Roote) are some of the best in the play. Lia Williams (Miss Cutts), the only female character, injects a pervasive and disturbing sexuality into the warped power play between the staff.
The set looks like an airless 1970s institution with its sideboards, stuffed brown armchairs, painful beige tiling and clunking telephones. The width and height of the Lyttleton stage are exploited to the full and the impression achieved is of a boundless terrifying prison. Even the stuffy, high-cut costumes seem to choke the humanity out of the characters.
At 2 hours and 20 minutes the play is hardly over long but it does run a little low on steam towards the end of the second half. It is not that Pinter runs out of ideas, quite the opposite: so many questions are posed and so much dramatic tension generated that it becomes almost overwhelming to sit in front of.
The walk-on part of Tubb, the head porter, is taken with some aplomb by Pinter’s lifelong friend Henry Woolf, to whom the play was originally dedicated. In a Guardian article Woolf describes their group of six schoolboy friends as “determined solipsists”.
“We lived in our heads. I often think that Pinter’s characters live in rooms that are projections of a private, cerebral world.”
The very essence of theatre is that it brings performers and audience into a confined, private space and tests the limits of what is possible within it. Pinter’s play achieves this and it is a genuine relief, at the end, to step out of The Hothouse and into the open air of the South Bank.
Watch the trailer for The Hothouse here:
The Hothouse runs until October at the National Theatre, London.
