Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2004

The New World Order and Other Plays
The Zoo

Emilie Bickerton

Harold Pinter's criticisms of the war in Iraq and the leaders that initiated it are well-known. The dissenting voice of the ageing playwright has marked a new phase in his creative work with recent material much more politically focused, including these six short plays?

Pinter has always been a bit of a cynic and his misanthropy has come out in some compelling analyses of the emotional and social worlds of his characters often exploring the many faces of human cruelty-family resentments, blackmail, exploitation, abuse, jealousy, desire, as well as the complex overlap between memory and the present. The political sphere is a new one for Pinter and one less well served by his artistic qualities.

OVO's adaptation of these new plays draws out well all the characteristics of any classic Pinter play: the long, heavily symbolic silences, the weighted sentences, the slow repetition and reformulation of phrases. But this is a play in six parts (rather than self contained sketches, though all are to an extent independent from each other), so the usually sparse, unchanging scenery is instead a busy, always shifting set, interspersed with the images and sounds of projected on screen as the backdrop. The screen serves numerous functions in fact; the play depends on the props of theatre as Pinter has never done before. Two scenes are carried out entirely on already-recorded video, and in each scene images flash up as characters speak, suggesting their past lives, their memories, or the frenzy of images that dominates contemporary life.

The essential concern of The New World Order is not so much presenting something definitively different, of the sort science fiction may imagine. Rather, the concentration is on the erosion of the old order, Pinter writes in reaction to it and not with any belief in resistance to it. The innocent victims are recognisable: the now notorious image of a hooded, hand-cuffed prisoner, a pregnant, abused woman, clusters of bemused villagers. All suffering at the hands of a brutal and ignorant police force, petty and powerful. Mountain language is outlawed, dissenters are weeded out, decisions are made between men in black suits on the benches of Whitehall, women are cruelly raped. All are tropes for this brutal transition phase, and the reflection of ideas of power.

The New World Order is striking for the lack of substantial resistance - we have victims and perpetrators, the former beaten, powerless, defeated, the latter cruel, righteous, sinister. The first scene even makes the dominant quite literally untouchable as the screen projects a recorded video. Two young men are seen on monitors, looking at a hooded prisoner (on the stage, the very tangible, real victim) as they talk of torture and suffering, their own feelings of purity through violence and repeat slowly, ominously 'It's just the beginning, it hasn't even started'. The screen confirms their absolute power, they are out of reach, banal and unbeatable, whereas the juxtaposition with the body on the stage makes only victimhood the only available agency for a populace under threat. In later scenes the video suggests past lives and memories and again the role of the actors on the stage, in the present, is subverted by this (in contrast) more passive form of representation, consigned to either the past, or a domain out of our control.

Having said this, the recorded footage is more suggestive, and could also imply not the image of the future, but a retrieved archive, a testimony to history, as the press conference uses the screen to record the Culture Minister's speech and thus make it a part of history. Indeed the scene, 'Press Conference' suggests that the regime is already past, as the minister talks of his ideas and motivations as a thing of the past, but treated with respect from the interviewing journalists. A new phase is thus in place, beyond the transitional authoritarianism, normality has set in.

The New World Order looks very much like the present one, and the ideas invoked by the previous Minister of Culture are traditional ones: religious fervour, defence of patriotism, a general misanthropy. No new or powerful ideology seems to be driving things. As with many of Pinter's plays the domestic setting is dominant, and even when it is the state of the 21st century at issue, much is revealed in the living room.

The greatest difficulty however is not the de-routing of politics into this domain (an appropriate one in many respects) but rather the lack of any grounding context: often one of Pinter's most potent strengths when he deals with the murkiness of human emotions and obliqueness or ambivalence. But when phrases are laden with meaning, yet always abstract, what they require for them to resonate in any way, is your own initial adherence to Pinter's outlook. If you do not subscribe to his arguments then the wilful obscurity remains as such and floats above political arguments, making it a difficult play to access and an isolating experience to watch.