Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

206 P. Standish
Some students’ notes on the Web 1 explain that, in Troubles in the Works, Pinter
is ‘using humour and irony’: the ‘absurd dialogue and situation refers to the inhuman,
ridiculous mechanical nature of industry’. The dialogue conveys ‘the sense
of entrapment that people can feel when they do meaningless work’. The ‘ridiculousness
symbolises the uselessness of human activity’. The manager is faced with
‘dissatisfaction and protest at everything he believes in. This totally unexpected criticism
gnaws at the foundations of his life’. Moreover, the ‘true intentions’ of the two
men are never given away.
Such earnestness from such a short sketch! Yet, what this gloss seems entirely to
miss is the way that the sketch could scarcely work without the manager’s savouring
of the names of the machine parts that the workers are so cruelly rejecting. One
can imagine his delight at the listing of these in the company catalogue. One can
imagine—one can hear!—his fluency in articulating these terms; and the shop steward
is no less adept in this—how else would he be credible? During rehearsals for
a revival of Pinter’s early sketches at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in 2007, the
writer and actor, Sean Foley, commented, ‘You realise that, while he’s unique as a
writer, he also belongs in a particular line of British comedy ... These are classic
comedy sketches, some of them written for revues and cabaret nights, and there’s
this strain of surrealism—he got there 12 years before Monty Python’. 2 Trouble
in the Works was first written for television but censored by the BBC in case it
fomented trade union unrest. It was only the censored version, ending with ‘Brandy
balls’, not ‘Trouble’ that made it into the published scripts.
The sketch is an early short work by Pinter, but as he came more to fame and his
characteristic style became better known, the critics coined the words ‘Pinteresque’
and ‘Pinterese’ not just for his famous ‘pauses’ but for his particularly facility in
capturing something of the rhythms and vocabulary of ordinary speech, including
the way that people linger on phrases, light upon a word, reiterate and repeat. As
the sketch shows, this includes an appreciation of the kinds of technical language
that, in various ways, have come to feature in our ordinary interactions, at work, in
our leisure activities and in our everyday understanding of ourselves. Pinter wanted
to reveal the unacknowledged poetic impulse in such language, especially given
poetry’s repression in so much of the culture as a whole (perhaps in Anglophone
culture above all). And this impulse is seen to run through the memorisation of
bus routes, the menus in a restaurant, the inventory of the machinery of torture and
batting averages in cricket. One can scarcely understand the sketch if one does not
attend to the alliterations, the rhythms, the repetitions that are, as I said, so obviously
savoured.
14.2
The sketch is firmly located in a particular, now largely bygone industrial world.
Fibbs’ elegy to male elbow adaptors, tubing nuts, grub screws, internal fan washers
and dog points evokes a particular kind of engineering practice: even if the sketch is