Mountain Language

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Mountain Language is a play written by Harold Pinter. It was first performed at the Royal National Theatre in London on the 20th of October 1988. It was "inspired by" the oppression of the Kurdish people, language and freedom of expression by the Turkish state. The text is universal in its relevance, however, as it contains no explicit geographical place setting nor any indication of time. Yet, the dialogue does contain several explicitly British or Western cultural references, thereby showing its applicability to the Great Britain even while its setting is indeterminate.

The play revolves around four main characters; a Young Woman (Sara Johnson), an Elderly Woman, A Hooded Man (Charley Johnson; husband of the Young Woman) and an unnamed Prisoner (son of the Elderly Woman. These characters are contrasted with the Officer, Sergeant and guards of the prison in which the Hooded Man and the Prisoner are being held captive.

The world of this play exposes the power of language. By military decree "mountain" people are forbidden to use their language and must use the "language of the capitol," which some cannot speak; and, therefore, they are unable to speak at all. Once informed in their "own language" that the decree is lifted, the Elderly Woman remains silent, perhaps distrusting the shift and/or perhaps resisting the power of those making it. (Her motivations for remaining silent are ambiguous.)

Pinter's play may allude to political and cultural contexts of Great Britain in the 1980s headed by the Conservative Party of Margaret Thatcher, which, for example, forbade the television networks from broadcasting the voice of the leader of the Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams. Any such suppression of language in England, Pinter suggests, is the kind of censorship characteristic of a totalitarian "state" not a democracy. The use of British slang in the play by the soldiers guarding the prison where the play is set suggests these parallels.

Although Pinter says that he himself has always disliked agitprop in the theater, finding it an "insult" to his "intelligence" as a member of the audience, he admits that his own overtly-political plays like Mountain Language are a kind of agitprop in his interview with Nicholas Hern about his previous play One for the Road (1984; "A Play and Its Politics" [New York: Grove Press, 1985]).

Mountain Language has one act and lasts about 25 minutes in production.

The Plays of Harold Pinter

Plays : Ashes to Ashes, The Basement, Betrayal, The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, Celebration, The Collection, The Dumb Waiter, The Dwarfs, Family Voices, The Homecoming, The Hothouse, A Kind of Alaska, Landscape, The Lover, Moonlight, Monologue, Mountain Language, A Night Out, Night School, No Man's Land, Old Times, One for the Road, Party Time, Remembrance of Things Past (with Di Trevis), The Room, Silence, A Slight Ache, Tea Party, Voices (with James Clarke) Sketches : Apart from That, Applicant, The Black and White, Dialogue for Three, Interview, Last to Go, The New World Order, Night, Precisely, Press Conference, Request Stop, Special Offer, That's All, That's Your Trouble, Trouble in the Works, Victoria Station