The aching hum of crickets. The susurrus of reeds. The lapping of waves. The unmistakable noise of a sound technician ripping a duster in two as the heroine’s dress was torn, thuggishly, by a character in the heat of passion… The sound effects for Harold Pinter’s adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Victory (which started life as a screenplay and has now been dramatised by Radio Four, Saturday)transported us to a private island in the Java sea. The fashion for recording radio broadcasts on location (parts of Radio Four’s recent War and Peace were taped at battle reenactments in the Czech Republic, for goodness sake) seems to be missing the point, which is all about testing a sound designer to summon up, say, a flock of angry seagulls using only an umbrella and some digital screeching.
The pairing of Conrad and Pinter was perfect, their mutual mastery of ambiguity creating an atmosphere that was, at times, overwhelmingly tense. No one is quite who they seem. A German passes himself off as an Italian. The reclusive Baron Heyst, a man of substance, is an Adam on his own paradise island. His shadow self begins to take over. He rescues a woman, Lena, from her terrible fate in an all-female travelling orchestra. Soon it turns out that she is also a cipher. ‘If you were to stop thinking of me I wouldn’t be in the world at all,’ she says, in lines imported from the novel. ‘I can only be what you think I am.’ For Conrad writing in 1914, those words would have referenced Husserl’s philosophy of phenomenology. In Pinter’s hands they became perfectly Pinteresque.
As well as the pleasure of following the dramatisation of Joseph Conrad’s last major novel, there was the secondary pleasure of envisioning the film that was never made, wondering about its reception, its camera techniques, its casting.
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