The Hothouse is hardly the best written of Pinter's works or the most exquisitely engineered, but it has a kind of unbuttoned, careening energy I find impossible to resist, and it suggests a road he might have taken had he not chosen to perfect the art of tergiversation. Most of Pinter's plays are not so much suggestive as evasive; his fondness for textual lacunae lays the burden of specificity on the actor. Since actors are hardly reluctant to comply, Pinter's scenes tend to move down instead of forward, tantalizing us with their ciphers and hieroglyphs. It is not to denigrate this playwright's extraordinary craftsmanship to say there may be a lot less in his work than meets the eye. Pinter admits to being amused when commentators labor over the "meaning" of his works, continuing to insist (correctly, in my view) that they mean no more than they say. The trouble is that what they say has grown increasingly precious, as if Pinter's closest pals these days were Bertie Wooster and Sebastian Flyte. His upper-class characters are so frozen and brittle that one wonders if he is satirizing their emotionlessness or actually trying to celebrate their "cool."
As its title suggests, The Hothouse, mercifully, is hot. Compared with Pinter's other play of this period, The Birthday Party, which has not aged well, it is vivid, molten, on fire. The characters are unpressed, no matter how they try to arrange themselves; they are controllers, but out of control. The scene is a mental institution, where the keepers themselves are mad. The invisible patients are identified only by numbers; there are no doctors, only a combative staff of edgy, querulous, ambitious functionaries. Nobody recovers in this institution; the only action involves the power games of the administration….
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