ABSTRACT
Increasingly concerned with married love, between The Lover and Tea Party Pinter adapted The Pumpkin Eater, directed by Jack Clayton from the novel by Penelope Mortimer. The play and the novel depict Jo as a woman who has too many children but who refuses victimization after she discovers her husband Jake’s infidelities. Instead she sets out on a brief odyssey of entanglements with several men in explorative, defensive retaliation, before returning, more nearly her husband’s equal, at the end. But again in Jake’s desire for the children’s nanny Philpot, Pinter continues probing questions of reality and the imagination. Jake’s desire for Philpot is sufficiently intense that it hardly matters whether he consummates it, the intensity of desire so overwhelms the act. The actual consummation of Jake’s multiple infidelities and their aftermath become trivial in the larger context of Jo and Jake’s marriage which seems able to sustain itself though a buffeting which returns in the end balanced on both sides.
