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The Royal Court Theatre's
"Mountain Language" was written four years
later, and it is a tour de force of brutish one-liners.
Set in an unnamed country, it opens with snow falling as
women line up before a prison to visit their husbands.
One woman's hand has been bitten by a Doberman pinscher:
"What was his name?" sneers the guard. The
women are all forbidden to speak their native tongue,
their "mountain language." Then, just as
arbitrarily, they are told they can speak it for the time
being. Too late — some of them have been terrorized
into silence.
Under Katie Mitchell's direction we heard prison doors
clang and jackboots stomp. Guards shouted orders and
insults. And except for one woman, clearly an
"intellectual" who could trade sexual
obscenities with them, the powerless once again had no
dramatic force. (A woman whose hands tremble in the fake
snow, or a man who falls on his knees before his
frightened old mother are not enough.) Mr. Pinter can
only dramatize cruelty. And because it is active, it is
easier to dramatize; it can make suffering look passive.
But the operative verb here is "look." Time and
again Mr. Pinter has been able to find what goes on
beneath the appearance of passivity. Why couldn't he find
it here?
Only when he brings political repression back into the
world he knows viscerally, the intimate world of the
urban and relatively urbane middle-class, does it come
alive theatrically.
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