ACTING IS JUST LIKE ‘OLD TIMES’ FOR PINTER

ST. LOUIS —  As World Series fever raged in this city last week, one person committed the Cardinal sin of paying it little attention. Harold Pinter is a passionate fan of cricket--that slow-paced sister sport involving a ball, a bat and something the English call a wicket.

Setting aside his other passions (as poet, producer, screenwriter, director and actor), Pinter is known best as a playwright, of course, with so distinctive a style and view of the world that he is among a handful of artists to have an adjective coined from his name.

Pinteresque may not yet be in Webster’s, but anyone in the theater will tell you that it specifically defines the indefinable: something terse, enigmatic, ambiguous, vaguely sensual, punctuated by silence and fraught with menace. In other words: a Pinter play, as in “The Homecoming,” “The Birthday Party,” “The Caretaker,” “Betrayal,” to name the most visible.

On the seventh floor of the Chase Park Plaza Hotel, sun streaming through open windows that overlooked fall colors in Forest Park, Pinter reminisced about “Old Times,” a play he wrote in 1969. He is not only its author, but is appearing in it with Liv Ullmann and Nicola Pagett on a tour that takes them from St. Louis to San Francisco via Los Angeles, where “Old Times” opens Wednesday at the Henry Fonda.

Why act now, why “Old Times”?

“It was an impulse,” Pinter said, settling back in a commodious armchair. “We had this production in England with a marvelous actor called Michael Gambon whom I’d wanted to play the part for a long time. I got this production going, in actual fact, with him as the center of it. Then the two ladies (Ullmann and Pagett) came into it. Then an American tour was proposed and to my great disappointment I found that Mr. Gambon was not available.

“I was on holiday with my wife (novelist Antonia Fraser) last whatever-it-was--some time earlier this year--and I suddenly said, ‘Why the hell don’t I play it?’ I’d always wanted to. Vaguely. And I suddenly thought it was a rather exciting idea and she thought so, too. David Jones (the director) went along with it. The American management here went along with it. So here I am.”

Pinter’s tone was relaxed. Looking fit and younger than his 55 years, it was clear that his life is expanding in enjoyable ways. Playing Deeley in “Old Times” marks his return to acting for the first time in 17 years (“Very demanding this acting business, but very exciting”). So exciting does he find it that he’ll act next year--as Goldberg in a BBC production of his “Birthday Party” (“I’ve just reached the right age for it”).

Last summer he staged “Sweet Bird of Youth” in London with Lauren Bacall and, in May, will direct the London premiere of Donald Freed’s “Circe and Bravo,” a fictional piece about a First Lady held captive at Camp David. (It was premiered last year in Los Angeles and will be done by the Denver Center Theatre Company in March). Next fall, Pinter expects to tour “Sweet Bird” in the United States, with Los Angeles on the route.

Did he, as the author of “Old Times,” influence its director?

“Very little,” was the answer. “When they first did it in London early this year, I was, of course, in attendance, as I always am. But I have a very strong and old working relationship with David Jones. He did the film of ‘Betrayal.’ When I started to work with him here as an actor, I advised him not to look on me as the author at all. I asked him to treat me simply as an actor.”

Since Pinter’s plays are deliberately mysterious and subject to interpretation, the question of influence becomes complex. Does he like to guide a director or let that director draw his own conclusions?

“I’ve worked for years in a very open situation with directors,” he said. “I mean, I say whatever I think. But either you’re directing it yourself, or you’re not. Finally, there is a director. His own feeling for the play has to be respected.

“I was quite interested last night; someone came to the stage door and asked me two questions. He said, ‘What we saw tonight was at a high level of’--he used the word satire. I think he meant that it was actually funny. I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Is that the way you prefer to see your work done?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘By that do you mean that you think much of your work is comedy?’ And I said, ‘Certainly.’ I have sometimes felt pretty irritated by a general air of gloom that seems to pervade certain productions of my work. Once in Paris I saw a ‘Homecoming’ which lasted for three hours, when I knew it should be over in two.”

In Los Angeles he could have seen an “Old Times” in which Deeley dropped his pants.

“WHAT! ‘Old Times’ seems to be kicked in the teeth quite a lot,” Pinter replied, anguished. “There was a famous production that (Luchino) Visconti did in Rome with Valentina Cortese which took place in a boxing ring. I actually stopped that one . . . I can’t be said to feel too happy about such idiocies.”

It seemed especially annoying because “Old Times” is a play Pinter said he’s fond of, a suspenseful menage a trois that tumbled from his subconscious in three days and was rewritten over some months. Can rewriting damage the original creative impulse?

“The activity has its own chemistry which is not susceptible to external rules,” Pinter remarked. “It’s a self-dictating thing. Perhaps damage would be too strong a word. Sometimes rewriting organizes or formalizes the work in a way that does affect it--has an ill effect upon it. But there is very little one can do about that. I find that my first splurge is really that: a splurge; a totally undisciplined mess on paper, which is the only way to get anything out.

“I’m not inclined to leave it like that and so I, indeed, try to shape it. If it suffers while it’s being shaped, then there’s nothing one can do.

“Some (plays) come from some specific thing and others come totally out of thin air. ‘Old Times’ came out of nowhere--an image of a man and a woman sitting in a room. The woman simply said: ‘Dark.’ She was obviously talking about someone else. The man asked the question, ‘Fat or thin?’ Those are the two first lines of the play. They’ve never changed.

“I think--as far as I remember--I became aware that the third character was somewhere in the room, not in the present, shall we say. It went on from there. But the play came, as I say, from nowhere. My first play, ‘The Room,’ did come from a specific image. And one or two others. On the whole, no. They just . . . come.”

And, on the whole, they have been . . . amazing. Elliptical and unsettling, “The Room,” “The Dumb Waiter” and “The Birthday Party” established him in the ‘50s as an important new writer. It’s easy to see why he admires Joyce, Kafka and Beckett (to whom he sends his work for comment).

In “The Caretaker” (1959) and “The Homecoming” (1964), the contained violence deepened and the sense of menace became more ambiguous. A byzantine sensuality crept into such shorter pieces as “The Lover”(1962) and “Tea Party” (1964). Poetry and a paradoxical tenderness filled the alienations of “Landscape” (1967). Pinter is a poet (he has two published volumes) and admits to the influence of Yeats, Eliot and Hardy, among others. By the time he wrote “Old Times” (1969) and “Betrayal” (1978), they were more overtly puzzles about sexual politics.

The word politics, in all of its applications, plays a central role in the Pinter lexicon. Last year, he wrote “One for the Road,” a terse, ultrapotent, un ambiguous play about human torture that marked a stylistic turning point. Unlike earlier plays that he now acknowledges to have been covertly political (“The Dumb Waiter,” “The Hothouse,” “The Birthday Party”), “One for the Road” is direct as an arrow and ushers him permanently out of the political closet.

“It certainly represents a permanent change in me as a citizen of the country,” he said “a man living in this world. It’s been happening for a very long time. In other words, I’ve become more and more political over the last 10 years--more politically engaged. And now I’m profoundly engaged.

“ ‘One for the Road’ has been done all over the world, but I was very interested to see that it was being done in Budapest. I received photographs. And it is going to be done in Warsaw. Where there is absolutely no chance of it being done is in Istanbul. There the people doing it would be arrested. The fictional torture very likely would become real.”

Pinter is a member of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Amnesty International and the vice president of English PEN (an organization of writers). In March he traveled to Turkey with Arthur Miller on behalf of International PEN. Yet he feels artists don’t influence politics much. “The only thing that will influence politics,” he said, “certainly in this country, and in my own country, is the voters.

“I do take the point that if I say something someone might listen. At the same time, I don’t talk as an artist; I talk as a man. Everyone has a quite essential obligation to subject the society in which we live to moral scrutiny. My own view is that the appalling danger that the world is in at the moment has to do with a schism that has actually been manufactured. I’m referring to Them and Us. To inhabit rigid and atrophied postures like these has led to the present danger.

As for the future, “I won’t, I’m sure, continue to write plays about politics, unless an authentic image comes into my mind which demands to be written. But I’ve no such plans and I can’t write out of ideological desire. That, almost invariably, is artificial. Dry. Manufactured. In other words, I’ve no idea what I’m going to write and I don’t anticipate that I shall continue to write political plays as such. I don’t know what my future is as a writer, but I’ve got a pretty good idea what my future is as a man.”

And that is . . . ?

“To continue to ask some very straight questions about the society in which we live, without fear or favor. In other words, I don’t give a damn how many people I offend.

“I was 15 when the war was over, so that one emerged out of that and lurched through adolescence into manhood as it were, with the weight of all that and the further reverberations--such as The Bomb and the Iron Curtain, McCarthyism here, repression in Eastern Europe. There seemed to be no end to it. But there is an end to it. There’s an end all right. My view, incidentally, is that that end is going to come.”

Inevitably? “I think it’s inevitable, yes. And on that note I shall have a glass of champagne.”