Mountain Language / Ashes to Ashes ( Archived )

Reviews

newspaper reviews

(L to R) Tim Treloar, Neil Dudgeon, Anastasia Hille

Production photography by Ivan Kyncl

Direction: Katie Mitchell Design: Vicki Mortimer Lighting: Paule Constable Sound: Gareth Fry

Cast includes: Gabrielle Hamilton, Anastasia Hille

“Katie Mitchell’s production starts with an adrenaline surge, as darkness falls suddenly on the auditorium like an ambush, and audience members’ ears are invaded with the hostile sounds of dogs barking and helicopters whirring. It feels as if each individual has been shoved rudely from the world of civilisation encapsulated in the Royal Court auditorium, and into the world of obscene and cruelly whimsical power games that we so comfortably associate with other political regimes.

“Mountain Language was first performed in 1988, and Ashes to ashes in 1996, but the two fit together as neatly as consecutive clauses in Pinter’s tightly constructed argument on aggression that goes back to plays like The Caretaker. By placing the darkly comedic Mountain Language before Ashes to Ashes, Mitchell robs the later of its much-criticised obliqueness, so that instead of viewing this second play as a domestic drama that escalates from the personal to the overtly political, through visual echoes, the warscape is there from the start.

“…Mitchell’s beautifully controlled aesthetic and imaginative use of sound reveals two plays where the language games and the scalpel-sharp dissection of human relationships carry an intriguing universality.”

EVENING STANDARD

“Dogs howl. Bells clang. Helicopter blades whirr. Katie Mitchell’s production of Mountain Language- the first part of a Pinter double bill- opens with a tremendous aural assault clangorously conjured by Gareth Fry.

“…Mountain Language was partly inspired in 1988 by Turkish suppression if the Kurdish language. But Pinter was at pains to point out that this short, sharp shock of a play was also about the threat to our democratic institutions.

“Mitchell’s production, however, returns it to a nightmare world of them rather than us: Pinter’s focus on the arbitrary appropriation of language by the heavy-handed state is almost lost amidst the camera-shutter scenic effects and tumultuous sound. You certainly get a sense of military panic as a woman, venturing down the wrong corridor, is suddenly confronted by a hooded, semi-naked man: what I miss is the dry routine of daily oppression.

“But Ashes to Ashes, a richly disturbing play first staged in 1996, fares much better in Mitchell’s assured hands, Two characters, Rebecca and Devlin, confront each other in a lamplit room. He, insecure like all Pinter males, naggingly probes her about a past lover: gradually it emerges the lover was not just sexually dominating but a high-level fascist functionary. And, by an almost imperceptible transference, Rebecca enters into the soul of one of his victims: a mother whose baby is taken from her as she boards a train for the camps.

“Suggested, I suspect, by Albert Speer’s latterday affair with a married German expatriate, Pinter’s play goes far beyond that to raise any number of haunting questions. One, obviously, is whether there is some strange sexual magnetism possessed by men implicated in appalling cruelty. The play asks how any man can function as both adoring lover and brutal apparatchik. Equally chilling is Devlin’s secret envy of the iron-fisted lover.

“…Hille moves from ironic mockery to an almost entranced hypnosis as she identifies with a victimised mother. And Dudgeon, assuming a mask of academic patronage, is reduced to floundering irrelevance. Nothing is resolved. But Mitchell’s production leaves a chilling Beckett image of Hille’s spotlit transubstantiation, and Pinter provides a master lesson in how the personal and the political are ultimately indivisible.”

Micheal Billington, THE GUARDIAN

“In Katie Mitchell’s intense productions, these two plays by Harold Pinter make perfect sense as a double-bill. In both, there’s a background of totalitarian barbarism and the implication that Britain could easily sink into this state. But whereas Mountain Language (1988) is devastatingly direct in its dramatisation of the plight of a people whose mother tongue is being suppressed, in Ashes to Ashes (1996), the suggestions of political horror seep more insidiously into a private situation. Played in an unbroken 60-odd minutes, the evening begins as the theatre suddenly pitches into darkness with the sound of barking guard dogs. Set in a prison camp, the four episodes of Mountain Language, which was inspired by the Turkish treatment of the Kurds, unfold as a succession of powerfully framed snapshots of jeering tyranny.

“…Anastasia Hille graduates from an artful vagueness to a desolate intensity, but neither she nor Neil Dudgeon- as her badgeringly inquisitive partner- can prevent the evocations of a Nazi-like horror from feeling studied. All told, though, a provocative hour.”

Paul Taylor, THE INDEPENDENT