BRIDGET in faint light.
Although the audience is rarely made privy to them, stage directions can often be essential quotes for doing a literary analysis of play. (This does not apply to those directed specifically to how a character should react or say a line which actors are taught from the beginning of their careers to ignore.) Stage directions are especially significant with a writer like Pinter for the direct contextual meaning of a spoken dialogue represents only the superficial surface of what they mean. Pinter is an immersive writer, meaning that his directions of how a scene is to be staged are taken more seriously by directors than that of other playwrights. That the daughter of the play whose existence is ambiguous at best opens the play with a monologue that only barely illuminates her physical being carries significance that the audience will only appreciate if following through effectively by the production.
JAKE: "Brother."
FRED: "Brother."
Within the universe of a playwright who traffics in ambiguity to the point that more than a few audience members watching either a stage play or film adaptation of his play find the stylized language veering a little too close to the line of maddening, the introduction to the two brothers in the play with each identifying the other as a sibling is almost a shock. Pinter is one of those writers who will do things like have a character already introduced suddenly referred to by other characters with a completely different name without immediately explanation. That Jakes and Fred identify their relationship to the other characters as well as to each other by identifying the familial relationship is clearly intended as something significant enough to warrant attention when trying to make one’s way through the labyrinth of confusion in search of the meaning at the center.
“Yes, it’s quite true that all your life in all your personal and social attachments the language you employed was mainly coarse, crude, vacuous, puerile, obscene and brutal to a degree. Most people were ready to vomit after no more than ten minutes in your company.”
There is little question that some fractional minority—perhaps a larger fraction and perhaps a small one—of those in the presence of a Pinter’s dialogue have also been moved to purge themselves of frustration and dislike. Pinter is an acquired taste and just as likely to produce an extreme of negative reaction as of positive. Thus, it may be possible that this quote from Bel describing her husband carries at least a recognition of the full breath of autobiographical awareness. One thing beyond argument is that it is a typical bit of discourse in which Pinter admits or confesses to his audience that his dialogue is about an intense of aware of the nature of language as a form of communication rather than merely a way to convey communication to the audience.
