Gerry Boyle '78

As a student at the University of Naatal in Durban, South Africa, Robert Gordon directed Harold Pinter's play Silence. After graduation Gordon spent two years as an actor in South Africa, but because Pinter was among the artists who boycotted South Africa in protest of the apartheid regime there, his work was off-limits to professional theater companies. Gordon moved to London, where he tried to quench his Pinter thirst. He took in John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson in Pinter's No Man's Land and Peggy Ashcroft in a Pinter revival. "It just fascinated me," Gordon said. "The cadences, really. The music of the language."

Chairman of the drama department at Goldsmiths College, University of London, Gordon was invited by Jim Thurston, chair of Colby's Theater and Dance Department, to take part in yet another Pinter festival, one held at Colby in September. The festival included Gordon and actors Lisa Brancaccio (daughter of Colby's Pat and Ruth Brancaccio) and her husband, Torbin Brooks, in three short Pinter plays, including Ashes to Ashes. Also, in the Runnals Cellar Theater, Anna-Michelle Young '02 directed Stuart Luth '01 and Noah Charney '02 in The Dumb Waiter. Lauren Schaad '01 directed Mountain Language.

The festival was part of the ongoing celebration of Pinter's 70th birthday. "Once we gave him an honorary doctorate at Goldsmiths College and I had to host him a bit," Gordon said. "One thing abo


u don't tackle him on his political opinions. Because he always tells you what he thinks and he's capable of using four-letter words, if you disagree with him too violently. Also, he's a very kind man. I was at a Pinter conference earlier this year and he came just to the dinner and did a reading for us. He's a brilliant actor. Very good. He read the short play Celebration. He read it brilliantly. He was nine characters. Just one person. He was every single character. He made each one seem slightly different. He was extraordinarily good."

Gordon says Pinter is a very private person and told the assembled scholars that he doesn't feel he can be in the same room while his work is being discussed, which it has been for nearly a half century. Gordon, who has written a book on Tom Stoppard, said he considers Pinter the greatest living English-language playwright
think it's probably the language, in a sense. And the sense of surrealism of the plays. When the play opens you're in a recognizable social world.&


. . More and more you realize it's a very deconstructed real world. There are gaps. He refuses to explain certain things. . . .

"Pinter doesn't write in the obviously avant-garde, that Beckett uses. He's not abstract. He doesn't just write the stream of consciousness-type stuff. Because he's English and he's an English actor, he starts with the terms of the English theater in his head."

Gordon says Pinter wrote in his early plays with great skill of the world of the working-class English and in recent years has effectively portrayed the upper class in England. "The question is, when you do it in the States, does it change?" Gordon asked. "Can you still capture these nuances? Does the American actor try to adopt a kind of fake British accent? We do that for Tennessee Williams and our actors are appalling."

Brancaccio and Brooks chose to do the plays with an English accent that, while not absolutely accurate, Gordon thinks would pass for an American audience. "As long as you can hear the style of the language, as long as you can hear the assumptions that the language makes, for an American audience that will be fine," Gordon said. "That's one of the things that I'm trying to test. It's a kind of practical research project."

The research will continue in Hungary and South Africa, where Gordon will stage Pinter plays. In those countries, he intends to examine whether the meaning of the plays changes in relation to the surrounding context. But there is one source Gordon won't be able to tap, and that's the playwright himself: "He doesn't like to be quizzed. . . . He'd rather just be with actors in the pub."–Gerry Boyle '78