Last time, I made some nebulous comparisons between a TV ad for a brand of soap that spooked me as a child and Harold Pinter's 1963 creation The Lover, which debuted as a television film, directed by Joan Kemp-Welch and starring Alan Badel and Vivien Merchant (who at the time was married to Pinter), before being transferred to the stage. This seems like a good enough opportunity to segue into talking about The Lover itself. Not only does it happen to be my favourite work of Pinter's, but the original 1963 film ranks as one of my all-time favourite pieces of television, period. The dialogue is tremendously witty, and the script boasts no shortage of beautifully constructed jokes, yet the film as a whole makes for such an incredibly intense and uncomfortable watch - a dry domestic drama charged by interludes of eroticism and a surprisingly sinister undercurrent. And it's poignant. There's an extent to which I find its ending scene almost unspeakably sad.
The Lover starts out with a perfectly nondescript scenario. Richard (Badel), the husband, is preparing to leave the house for a day at the office, and goes to bid Sarah (Merchant), the wife, farewell. But with the first words out of his mouth, the mundaneness is completely shattered, as he wastes no time in dropping their relationship's big bombshell: "Is your lover coming today?" "Mmm" replies an appreciative Sarah. After establishing that Sarah and her lover intend to occupy the house until about 6pm, Richard wishes her a pleasant afternoon, and departs.
So yes. While Richard is out at the office all day (or so he claims...), Sarah's favoured method of passing the hours is to entertain an extramarital lover, an arrangement that Richard not only tolerates but openly discusses with Sarah on return. Sarah's shamelessness initially seems to stem from the understanding that Richard takes no more than he dishes out - early in the film, Sarah coaxes Richard into admitting that he is not, in fact, at the office during the afternoon but out having an affair of his own, a revelation that bothers her only because Richard does not speak of his extramarital partner with the same degree of warmth and affection that she does her own:
Richard: You can't sensibly enquire whether a whore is witty. It's of no significance whether she is or she isn't. She's simply a whore, a functionary who either pleases or displeases.
Sarah: And she pleases you?
Richard: Today she's pleasing, tomorrow one can't say.
Sarah: I must say I find your attitude to women rather alarming.
Richard: Why? I wasn't looking for your double, was I? I wasn't looking for a woman whom I could respect as you, whom I could admire and love as I do you, was I? All I wanted was, how should I put it, someone who could express and engender lust with all lust's cunning. Nothing more.
This is not your traditional love triangle, however. There is a dramatic twist, midway through the proceedings, which massively alters our understanding of the situation, and it's here that I give notice to anyone unfamiliar with either the television film or the play to turn back now, lest you miss out on the opportunity to experience this wonderful story fresh.
On the second day, we finally get a decent look at Sarah's lover, and he turns out to be...none other than Richard himself, under the assumed moniker of "Max". That's right, all this talk of their respective affairs transpires to have been nothing more than a bit of kinky role-playing on the part of a bored couple desperately seeking refuge from the stagnant state of their relations. All innocent fun and games then? Not exactly. Once we have this vital knowledge, we can see that the interactions between Richard and Sarah during the first half of the film are loaded with uncomfortable double meanings. Both players, in their commitment to maintaining the fantasy, are never permitted to break character, from either side of the equation (Sarah, to Richard's chagrin, commits a taboo early on, in neglecting to change her shoes between Max's departure and Richard's return). As such, whatever commentary each has to offer on the content of their role-playing can be made only indirectly (the absence of direct communication was a favourite recurring theme of Pinter's). Having returned on the first evening, Richard takes the opportunity to complain about the intense sunlight he experienced earlier in the sitting room as Max: "Very sunny on the road. Of course by the time I got onto it the sun was beginning to sink, but I imagine it was quite warm here this afternoon." This also gives added significance to the portions of dialogue where they speak of their respective lovers, for they are, in practice, giving critiques of one another's performances and their overall impressions of what this reveals of the person underneath. Hence, Sarah's indignation at being described as a "common or garden slut", when the worst observation she has to offer about Richard/Max in return is that he "has his moods, of course." The interplay between Sarah and Richard, and the clear disparity between what the fictitious affair means to each of them, is indicative of the tensions brewing beneath their (admittedly unconventional) display of domestic harmony. Sarah, who asserts that "Things are beautifully balanced", is ostensibly happy with the arrangement, but we can trace Richard's expression of dissatisfaction right back to his initial description of his (equally fictitious) day at work: "Long meeting. Rather inconclusive." Compare this to his summary of the subsequent day's work, which follows on from his motion, as Max, to bring about an end to the role-playing - "What a dreary conference, went on all day. Still good work done, I think. Something achieved" - and it becomes apparent that Richard's daily synopses of life in the office are actually pithy summaries of his latest tenure as Max - in essence, his job - expressed in the driest and least emotional terms possible.
We learn that Sarah and Richard have been married for ten years, and it is implied that things between them were (perhaps not unexpectedly) a lot more fervid in the beginning - Sarah states that "I didn't take my lover ten years ago. Not quite. Not on the honeymoon," in response to Richard's charge that she has forced him to endure a "humiliating ignominy" for the past decade. Their relationship now is almost comically sterile - Pinter makes a point of illustrating their non-existent sexual relations by showing that they sleep in separate beds. Sarah's lack of passion for Richard is signified in her repeated offer of a cold supper every evening - she reserves all of her fire and intensity for Max, a fact that makes Richard absurdly jealous. The "ignominy" of which he speaks is rooted in the frustration of being unable to experience sexual relations with Sarah without pretending to be someone else - previously, he conveyed disbelief at Sarah's profession that it is Richard, and not Max, whom she really loves. Sarah's reference to their honeymoon, meanwhile, alludes to a time when she and Richard were able to enjoy more conventional intimacy, with her "not quite" in particular suggesting that Max is a lot closer to the suitor Richard was back in the day. During one of their earlier sparring matches, Sarah challenged Richard's assertation that she was the first to "look elsewhere", suggesting that it was changes to Richard's interests and disposition that proved the snake in their marital Eden - which in itself prompts the question as to which identity is assumed and which represents the "true" character. Sarah, meanwhile, might claim that the status quo is beautifully balanced, but we sense that this merely a compromise on her part and that, given the choice, she would sooner have Max full time. When Richard comments that Max has never seen the night from the house, Sarah gives the pointed response, "He's obliged to leave before the sunset, unfortunately." We can only speculate as to whether her faux pas involving the shoes was genuinely a mistake, as she claims, or an act of rebellion (conscious or unconscious) designed to coax Max out of Richard out of hours. This also accounts for why Sarah takes Richard's "common or garden slut" remarks as sorely as she does; more than simply a light-hearted jab at her contributions to the role-playing, Richard is deliberately downplaying the possibility that these games constitute anything more to him than, as he so delicately puts it, "a quick cup of cocoa while they're checking the oil and water".
The notion that these afternoon visits from Max represent a return to a kind of marital purity for the couple is tempered by the nature of their erotic exchange, which thrives on a heavy air of threat and danger. While Max and Sarah are together, they delve into deeper role-playing games still, in which both characters flit between a range of identities. Sarah, who is alternately addressed by Max as "Dolores" and "Mary" throughout this sequence, assumes the role of a vulnerable woman pursued by a potential rapist while awaiting her husband in a park, and rescued by a man claiming to be the park keeper; both assailant and benefactor are fulfilled by Max. The precariousness continues as the self-proclaimed park keeper lures Sarah/Dolores/Mary into the park keeper's hut and apparently traps her there, intermittently shrinking away to acknowledge the wife he insists is still waiting for him. We see extracts from another game in which the two dance their fingers across a bongo drum (an image that appears in both the opening and closing titles) as part of a ritualised interaction; the tentative manner with which Sarah's fingers approach and stroke Max's, followed by the predatory manner with which he grabs and pins down her hand, also conveys an element of threat. As is aptly observed in the BFI's entry on the film, their hands look like a pair of mating spiders, giving a precarious, potentially deadly air to the proceedings.
The Lover is predominantly a two-hander, with Badel and Merchant being the only on-screen figures to feature for most of the film, although a third character does appear, briefly, at around the midway mark. While waiting for her lover to arrive, Sarah is startled by an unexpected (and undesired) call from the local milkman, played by Welsh actor Michael Forrest. As per the play's Wikipedia entry, the appearance of the milkman is a simple diversionary tactic on Pinter's part: "Pinter leads the audience to believe that there are three characters in the play: the wife, the husband and the lover." This may well be true for the stage productions, and the impression you might indeed be inclined to form if you noticed three names on the playbill. It is noteworthy, however, that the original television film does not attempt to practice this deception on the viewer, with Forrest receiving no credit until the end. To the contrary, I would suggest that Forrest's very presence, however fleeting, is a disturbance; when Sarah opens the door to reveal him standing there in the place of her lover, he registers immediately as a stranger to this scenario. The viewer knows, from the outset, that he is not Sarah's lover (although his being a milkman constitutes an entire gag in itself) - earlier in the film, we get a small glimpse of her lover from behind, and the two visibly do not match. More critically, the first half of the film has been so tightly restricted to Sarah and Richard, and to what goes on within the confines of their property, that the appearance of a third person catches us off of guard, to an extent that exposes how much we have subconsciously anticipated the story's twist all along. One of the key themes of the film is isolation, with the milkman's minor but by no means superfluous role conveying something of the couple's ambivalent relationship with the outside world. Part of what makes his appearance so impinging is that he catches sight of the unwary Sarah in the seductive gear she dons exclusively for Max's visits; he represents the prying eyes and judgement that Sarah, who had previously remarked how lucky she and Richard were to live in such seclusion, spends the entirety of the film shielding herself from. He also embodies both the temptations and the perils of the world beyond, as signified in his repeated effort to peddle "cream" to the unwilling Sarah; what makes this staggeringly unsubtle bit of innuendo so hilarious is his attempt to add incentive by inferring a rivalry with a neighbouring housewife Mrs Owens (she just had three jars...clotted). Being such a cliched vessel of illicit sexual gratification, he does, in
his own perverse way, represent the threat of conventionality, an offer that Sarah is particularly adverse to. His thinly-veiled crudeness make him a refreshing interlude to the deliberately stilted and reserved exchanges that have occurred between Sarah and Richard, but his predatory intentions also make him a sinister figure, in a manner that seems to prefigure Sarah's mock-vulnerability at the hands of the various pursuers played by Max. It's a dangerous, dangerous world out there, and it parks itself right on Sarah's doorstep.
The milkman and his mention of bored housewife Mrs Owens are our only objective insights into the wider community that exists beyond Richard and Sarah's self-contained soap opera. The strongly claustrophobic atmosphere of the film is sustained not only by the fact that we never see anything more of it, but also that we can never be certain just how many of Richard and Sarah's alleged activities therein are genuine or products of fantasy. Does Richard even go to an office at all, or is this simply part of the act? If so, then how is he whiling the hours until Max's visits at three o'clock? We get some indication that he does not travel far - Sarah objects to his description of his mistress as "handy between trains" on the grounds that he does not travel by train, but by car, suggesting that he has inadvertently strayed from the rules of their established narrative in mixing up his designated transport method. And what of Sarah's mention of her having had lunch in the village? Did she actually go, or are she and Richard simply going through the motions in churning out meaningless detail before they can get to the juicy part in digesting their latest bout of role-playing? If Sarah did go to the village, then she got little from it - as per her account, she saw no one and her lunch was merely fair. Sarah later professes to be thankful for their seclusion, and to live so far away from the main road, a statement that somewhat undermines Richard's preceding caution against laughing too loud at Max's jokes, lest it encourages the neighbours to gossip. We have no idea if there actually are any neighbours within hearing distance, although the threat of gossip from external forces is certainly present in the milkman's indiscretion about his own success in peddling cream to Mrs Owen.
The couple do not seem to have much affinity with the outside world, although their reclusive lifestyle does not, conversely, offer much of a refuge. To the contrary, they thrive on the danger in their seclusion, in the knowledge that they are alone and that no one can hear them. "Richard" and "Sarah" are merely the front they put on, possibly to the external eyes but mainly to themselves - it is the time when things are at their most formal and clearly defined, and when there are strict parameters that cannot be crossed. Richard's departure and return under the guise of Max, and Sarah's similar shedding of her austere garments into more alluring apparel, signify a loosening of these social/personal restrictions, until finally both characters are ready to delve into a tortuous wilderness in which they each possess no fixed identity at all. The prosaic sitting room becomes a menacing no-man's-land, in which offender and defender, husband and lover, wife and mistress are all merely different sides of the same coin. Here, the roles of husband and wife are specifically cited as roles to which they are intermittently obliged to return, but for the moment find great exhilaration in wandering from.
There is a liberation in their games, but it also entails entrapment, something that becomes apparent when Richard, ever jealous of his alter ego and his wife's blatant preferences for whom, elects to disrupt the entire routine. His resentment culminates in a tirade on both sides, as he attempts to end the fictitious affair, first as Max and then as Richard. Here's where Richard decides to rewrite the rules of the game completely, leading Sarah down a cruel and confusing path. Some of his statements, such as his comments about Sarah being too bony, are deliberately contradictory and designed to discombobulate her. Other times, he violates the established narrative by supplementing it with earth-shattering creations of his own - most explosively, he gives the couple imaginary children (the only such reference in the entire script) whom he claims are away at boarding school - leading the game into hitherto unknown, and therefore dangerous territory. Sarah is eventually provoked into playing Richard at his own game, and starts fashioning fantasies of her own out of thin air, whereupon we get a callback to the episode with the milkman: "I have other afternoons, all the time, and neither of you know...I give them strawberries in season, with cream. Strangers, total strangers! But not to me, not while they're here." For as intense as their climactic stand-off becomes, both characters remain committed to the most cardinal rule of their fantasy - that is, neither will explicitly acknowledge that Richard and Max are one and the same - for its duration, almost to an unsettling degree. In particular, it is unclear whether Richard's ludicrous declaration that, should he ever happen across Max on the premises, "I'll kick his teeth out", constitutes a further indulgence of the fantasy, a deliberate expression of self-loathing, or the very peak of absurdity with regards to his jealousy toward Max. He pushes Sarah within a whisker of crossing this forbidden line when he suggest that, should she continue the affair, then she do so outside of the house: "Take him into the field...find a ditch, a slag heap, find a rubbish dump...buy a canoe and find a stagnant pond. Anything anywhere, but not in my living room!" Sarah protests that this is not possible, but is unable to elaborate further when challenged by Richard. Naturally, Sarah is unable to continue without Richard's mutual participation, but we also see shades here of her antipathy to the outside world, and a means of interpreting the symbolism behind her house-bound existence. Earlier, during their sexual role-playing, Max had taunted Sarah by insisting that she was trapped, something that Richard later repeats while fingering the bongo drum previously reserved only for Max and Sarah (much to Sarah's alarm). What, exactly, is the nature of Sarah's entrapment?
The entrapment Sarah faces is the same as that faced by Richard, which is to say that they are trapped with one another. Ultimately, The Lover plays like a commentary on the depths of the codependency between these characters. For Richard and Sarah are a couple well-accustomed to one another, and who effectively have nothing but each other. From that perspective, we might question which need the role-playing better fulfils - is an attempt to rekindle the sex life that has inevitably waned now that their honeymoon days are long behind them, or a means of coping with the reality of their mutual dependence? They are bored with one another, but emotionally reliant on one another for normality, to the extent that, rather than look to the outside world as a means of escaping the monotony of their marriage, they are obliged to create that escapism among themselves. The paradox being that the game ceases to function as escapism, once it has become part of the established normality. While the visits from Max - a throwback to Richard's younger days, when he was a passionate and spontaneous suitor - still mean the world to Sarah, for Richard the constant alternation from one alter ego to the next has become a burden. His resentment appears to stem, in part, from the awareness that he is, by now, assuming the role of Max more for Sarah's gratification than his own (it is probably not a coincidence that Richard launches his aggressive rebellion on the day that Sarah actively requests an afternoon with Max). His main grievance, though, is hinted in his early complaints about the sitting room, his references to "these damn afternoons, this eternal tea time", and his observation that "to have as the constant image of your lust, a milk jug and a tea pot must be terribly dampening." As jealous as Richard is of Max, and the affections and privileges Sarah keeps exclusively for Max, he's also aware that Max has grown weary of his own lot.
The film ends on an ambivalent note, with Richard and Sarah once again lapsing into their sexual role-playing, and the lover and the whore resurfacing. Richard's rebellion has not, in practice, brought an end to their fantasy, but merely shifted the rules of the narrative, so that Max now lays claim to the house in the evening and can finally remain after the sunset with Sarah. Max has assumed the territory previously designated to Richard, and as such it might be tempting to read the ending as a sign that the barriers have been broken and that Max (aka the younger, more passionate Richard) has returned full-time. Of note is that Sarah does not address Richard as "Max" at the end, but purports instead to recognise her lover underneath Richard's guise - "I've never seen you like this before...why are you wearing this strange suit, and this shirt? Usually you wear something else". Their sensual interactions do, nevertheless, continue to be framed within the realm of fiction, with Sarah indicating that the man standing before her is not her husband, and accounting for his absence by stating that he is at a late-night conference. There is also a slight disturbance in the film's closing line, when her lover addresses her as "You lovely whore" - "whore" being a term that Richard, and not Max, had ascribed to Sarah. This follows on from Sarah's offer to change her clothes (presumably into the alluring gear restricted only to Max's visits), to which Richard agrees: "Yes...change...change...change your clothes." The repeated emphasis on "change" calls to mind the extent to which this alternation between identities is mutual; Richard sheds his aloof shell and becomes Sarah's sensitive lover, via the very same process through which she strips away her own outer layer of decorum and becomes Richard's lovely whore. The play thus ends with both a truce and a compromise. The couple's bond will continue to endure, but they remain reliant on the crutch of fiction to keep them afloat. Is this simply the price of having lived with a significant other for over a decade, and knowing them inside out, to the extent that fantasy is needed in order to inject some degree of improvisation? Or perhaps this lover and whore would quite happily be so 24/7, only the husband and wife play too indispensable a role in providing the pillars from which they delight in deviating as part of their danger-fuelled erotism.
I first experienced The Lover as the television film, when the BBC aired it as part of a Pinter retrospective in 2002 (unfortunately the film was initially produced for ITV, so it was not featured on the Pinter At The BBC DVD collection released by BFI in 2019). I did, however, see a stage production of it some years later, paired in a double bill with another Pinter two hander, The Dumb Waiter. The two key points that stood out were:
a) The appearance of the milkman immediately got a huge laugh from the audience. The milkman in the production I saw was also a lot less threatening than that portrayed by Forrest in the film.
b) On that note, the production in general tended to put greater emphasis on the campiness of the scenario. Elements of threat and claustrophobia were still retained, but this production went for a somewhat more overtly comic vibe than the film; let's just say that this Max made for a slightly more awkward suitor than Badel's. Of course, I'd say that much of the threat in the film version comes from the intense close-ups, particularly wherever Badel's steely gaze is involved, which the stage version naturally has to make do without.
Interestingly, I saw the play with a friend who went in totally ignorant to the plot, and his initial reaction to the big reveal had been to assume that Richard and Max were indeed different characters in context, just played by the same actor (a technique that admittedly works more convincingly on stage than on film), but he got wise when Richard professed to having dumped his mistress for being "too bony". Obviously, if you study their language throughout the first act it becomes apparent that Richard and Max are one and the same, but only with the benefit of hindsight, so I wonder how common my friend's misconception is among audiences who first experience the story through the stage version. It's my theory that we do subconsciously anticipate the twist, but perhaps that only strictly applies to the television film - there at least, we're so tightly immersed in Badel and Merchant's tense and secluded world that any permeation from outside forces seems borderline impossible.
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