Pounding pulse of theatre

IT might be possible to argue about the value of Harold Pinter's shorter plays as literary texts but after the second week of the Gate's Pinter Festival, it is impossible to deny their force in the theatre. To watch Lindsay Duncan in Pinter's most recent work Ashes To Ashes and Penelope Wilton in his 1982 play A Kind Of Alaska was to have a ringside seat on judgment day. A writer whose work can evoke such magnificent performances is indisputably in the ranks of the blessed.

Both plays make extraordinary demands on the central performers. Neither gets to move much - Duncan is mostly on an armchair, Wilton mostly in bed. Neither gets to interact. The men on stage with them (Stephen Rea and Jim Norton respectively) ask questions, probe and prompt, but there is no real dialogue. The questions are often ignored; they evoke responses rather than replies. The relationships are strained and artificial. Rea could be an interrogator, a psychiatrist, or a husband; Norton is a doctor but one who is in a sense meeting his patient for the first time after 29 years of care.

And neither of the women has what could be called a fixed character to play. Duncan's is a contemporary Englishwoman who seems to have witnessed what she could not have seen the Holocaust. Wilton's is a 45-year-old woman who has been asleep since she was 16, so that she too exists somewhere between the present and the past.

And yet both women, under the direction of Pinter himself and of Karel Reisz, produced extraordinarily engrossing performances. Both achieved the kind of absolute physical control that makes every movement count. Yet both created the illusion of not being in control at all. They became, not so much actors, as minds being acted upon by the invisible forces that surrounded their sundered selves. They turned their faces into pools of water whose surfaces reflected every stirring in the unseen sky above them. And Wilton especially created through her hands, eyes and voice the outward signs of an intensely dramatic struggle within her head. Not since Siobhan McKenna in Bailegangaire has the Dublin seen such a magnificent performance from an actress.

What you feel in such performances is the pulse of theatre itself. One of the things worth noting about these plays is that each deals with a situation that has been treated of in dozens of contemporary movies. The central notion of Ashes To Ashes - the psychic aftershock of the Holocaust - is familiar from, for instance, Sophie's Choice. The governing idea of A Kind Of Alaska - that of a young woman in an older woman's body is, in essence, one which runs through a long sequence of increasingly awful Hollywood body-change comedies of the 1980s and 1990s, and it is actually inspired by the same book on which the Robin Williams movie Awakenings was based.

And yet, in Pinter's hands, the familiar becomes strange, the obvious becomes ambiguous, and the large generalities of the movies break down into the intimacies of human presence. By compressing both time and space, by saying only what has to be said, by shaping the absences for the audience's imagination to fill, Pinter uses theatre not just as a different art form but as a different way of knowing.

In his screen adaptation of L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between, Pinter had its famous opening line spoken in a voice-over: "The past is foreign country. They do things differently there." Ashes To Ashes and A Kind Of Alaska could both be regarded as meditations on that notion which is, through the action on stage, endorsed but qualified.

In both plays, the past the historic past of the Holocaust, the personal past of childhood - is still out there, still a territory to be visited. In the former Rebecca is drawn back to "memories" of forced labour factories and babies on railway platforms being snatched from their mothers' arms.

In the latter, Deborah, waking after a 29-year trance, is still her adolescent self, her experiences and memories frozen at the moment when she was struck by sleeping sickness. As her doctor Hornby (Jim Norton) tells her "You ventured into quite remote utterly foreign . . . territories. You kept on the move." (The same idea of the past as a territory "which remains icy and silent" works its way through No Man's Land, the last play in the season, which opens this week.)

But if the past is a foreign country it is one that has assembled an invading army and is intent on annexing and engulfing the present. The drama of both plays is the struggle of the two women to emerge into their own lives. In Ashes To Ashes it is a losing battle. In the more powerful and poignant A Kind Of Alaska the issue is always doubtful.

At one stage Deborah's sister (Bernadette McKenna) asks the doctor "Shall I tell her lies or the truth?", and he replies "Both." In these two plays, there are real events the Holocaust, the invention of the drug L-DOPA which allowed people to emerge from decades of suspended animation - in the background. But the truth needs to be laced with the lies, illusions and uncertainties of theatre if it is to live in our imaginations. And Pinter emerges from this second season of his work at the Gate as a truly great liar.