[In the following review, Ford praises Landscape as “one of the most resonant of Harold Pinter's shorter pieces.”]

Landscape is one of the most resonant of Harold Pinter's shorter pieces. Although written for the stage, it was originally performed on the radio in 1968 because the censors of the about-to-be-dissolved Lord Chamberlain's office objected to the play's language—in particular Pinter's use of the phrase “Fuck-all”. In fact, Landscape is one of Pinter's dreamier performances, and is certainly less viscerally shocking than anything he had written up to that point. Nearly all of his earlier plays build towards specific and irrevocable acts of aggression which lead to the pivotal characters being either appropriated—like Stanley in The Birthday Party—or expelled, like Davies in The Caretaker. In Landscape, however, the urge towards violence is denied any active dramatic embodiment.

This is because—as its title suggests—nothing actually happens in the play, which consists of two interwoven monologues. It features a middle-aged couple, Duff and Beth, seated throughout at opposite ends of a long kitchen table. Duff addresses his words to Beth, but doesn't appear to hear her voice, while Beth seems wholly oblivious of her partner from start to finish.

In both spirit and technique, Landscape is the Pinter play most obviously influenced by the theatre of Samuel Beckett. Even the names have a Beckettian ring. Like Winnie and Willie in Happy Days, Beth and Duff fit perfectly together without ever establishing actual contact. Whereas Pinter's previous dramas thrive on the energies of antagonism, Landscape explores the shifting configurations of the inner consciousness, the suspended, isolated realms of fantasy and memory fixation and loss.

The play's refusal of the possibilities of dramatic action, or even relation, suits the romantic Beth much better than her fidgety, frustrated husband. While she rapturously relives the experience of their first meeting, consummated, in the dunes by the sea, Duff witters on about being caught in the rain, sheltering under a tree in the park, and meeting “some nut” in the local who complains about the beer in characteristically Pinteresque terms: “Someone's made a mistake, this fellow said, someone's used this pintpot instead of the boghole.”

Duff's narratives of the mundane intermittently reveal, however, a yearning to be noticed which culminates towards the play's conclusion in a violent vision of possession: “you'll plead with me like a woman, I'll bang the gong on the floor, if the sound is too flat, lacks resonance, I'll hang it back on its hook, bang you against it swinging, gonging, waking the place up, calling them all for dinner, lunch is up, bring out the bacon, bang your lovely head. …” The furious impotence of such imaginings graphically demonstrates the way both characters' sublimated desire to achieve control effectively imprisons each in the private language of obsession.

Beth's lyrical reminiscences are less aggressive, but are equally a means of reducing the other to a figure of fantasy. Her trance-like recollection of the origins of their relationship fixes Duff as a shadowy, forceful stranger who represents all the mysteries of romance. Her seamless loop of memory blocks out all awareness of the present, and much of the play's pathos derives from the gap between her image of Duff in his prime, and the banally maundering middle-aged man across the table, desperate for her attention.

This excellent production is directed by Pinter himself, and stars Pinter veterans Ian Holm and Penelope Wilton. Although their intertwined monologues encapsulate radically opposed visions of their life together, and neither ever hears the other speak, they yet generate an intense, though wholly negative, rapport. The effect is almost of meticulously scored counterpoint; Wilton's rich, sensuous nostalgia seems both motivated and justified by Holm's insistent, plaintive wheedling, which in truth seems inspired by her complete indifference to his presence. In a way, the failure of their voices explicitly to interact at any point becomes itself expressive of an inescapable mutual dependence.

In the context of Pinter's overall career, Landscape seems a rather transitional piece, a deliberate move away from the theatre of conflict towards a more open-ended drama in which individual battles of will are subsumed within the larger patterns of time passing. Indeed, the play itself enacts this struggle; Duff's efforts to establish himself as a social entity end in collapse in mid-speech, while Beth's circling soliloquy might continue indefinitely.

The aura of timelessness conveyed in Beth's monologue is reflected also in the spare wooden set which avoids suggesting any very particular period or social environment. We learn from Duff that the couple worked in the service of a certain Mr Sykes, in the basement of whose house they still live, though he appears to be dead. After his hectic rape fantasy, Duff falls silent, and, as with the later Betrayal, the play concludes with the primary moment of rapture that initiated the narrative, an elemental vision of love both permanently true, and contradicted by everything that has happened since: “So silent the sky in my eyes. Gently the sound of the tide. … Oh my true love I said.”