The following is a statement from a production dramaturg on: “why this play now?” Examining the political moment in which we are creating theatre, what does it mean to be approaching this text at this moment in time?
WHY THIS PLAY NOW?
by Jonathan P. Eburne
Mountain Language is a drama of incarceration. With ruthless brevity, Harold Pinter’s 1988 play exists in a nameless present. This could happen anywhere. The play does not so much stage “universal truths” about the dehumanizing conditions of absolute power, as to insist on how mobile, how adaptable, how reproducible those conditions have been.
What does it take to divide a population from itself, to separate the disenfranchised from sovereign, the drowned from the saved? The history of the twentieth century offers a grim register of genocidal principles of division: the racial registration and identity cards of South African Apartheid; the laws and practices of racial segregation of the Jim Crow-era United States; policies of enforced assimilation in European settler colonies, as throughout the Americas; the persecution and murder of Jews in Russia and, later, throughout Europe during the Holocaust.
How tempting it is to view these acts of categorization and division—with the atrocities they produce—in the rear-view mirror of history. But they keep happening, again and again, in countless guises: think of the categorial discernment between “illegal” migrants to be arrested at the border, or hunted down, incarcerated, and deported, from “internationals” or “exiles” to be welcomed. Media photographs of children in cages depict not a time or place that is far away from us; these events are happening here, and now. As you read this, an Immigrant Detention Center is opening in Clearfield County, in a former prison; the plans were ratified in November 2021. Think dirty wars and disappearances of right-wing military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina, which subjected political dissidents to clandestine imprisonment, torture, and murder. Such covert acts of violence are not limited to the 1970s and 1980s; they are happening now in Russia, in Saudi Arabia, in Pakistan, in China. Think of civil wars and territorial denials of statehood that take place between and within established political borders: Northern Ireland; Syria; Palestine; Ukraine; Iraq; Kashmir; Tibet; Yugoslavia; Ethiopia.
What makes Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language such an important response to the ongoing reality of political terror is that it does not demand a history lesson for us to feel its power. As the play’s title suggests, it is a drama of language, not a lecture on human rights. Pinter does not preach.
Something about the way the language works: the arbitrariness yet absoluteness of division. Not separated by race or identifying characteristics, but by sheer designation alone. Mention the Stanford Prison experiment? Severs the work of authoritarianism from any sense, however misguided or ideologically suspect, that the reasons for authoritarianism reside in the bodies, race, gender, sexual activity, or morality of the victims. What is a “Mountain Language”?