Mrs. Pinter

"Look at me," says the actress, coolly pronouncing her lines. "I move my leg. That's all it is. But I wear [pause] underwear [pause] which moves with me [pause]. It [pause] captures your attention." It does indeed. And so does just about everything that happens in Harold Pinter's Broadway play The Homecoming (TIME, Jan. 13). The drama is strictly Theater of the Absurd--opaque, funny here, touching there, deeply disturbing, and in sum the most compelling show in a dreary Broadway season. What helps make it so is the actress in the moving underwear, Vivien Merchant. She also happens to be the wife of Playwright Pinter and the woman who has helped make most of her husband's play come to life.

In Homecoming Vivien plays temptress and tigress, an enigmatic queen of the snarling jungle in her in-laws' house. Her hooded hazel eyes crinkle with bemusement, sag in boredom, flash with killing contempt or sexual electricity. Her fellow actors are all members in high standing of Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company, but it is Vivien who overpowers them all as the household whore-mother.

Breadwinner. Vivien's physical domination of the stage comes from matchless body control, the result of ballet training, which she began at the age of three with her mother, a dance teacher. She had no drama coaching except for elocution lessons to correct her Manchester accent. She met Pinter, who himself started as an actor, while touring the provinces with a Shakespearean troupe. Their marriage in 1956 gave Pinter a sure breadwinner in the house and enabled him to try playwriting. Today they own a splendid five-story Georgian town house overlooking Regent's Park in London--the House the Absurd built.

At home the Pinters never talk shop, his or hers. Right now, she says, her husband "is scribbling away, but I don't know at what." She declines to discuss The Homecoming or any other Pinter play with outsiders. What she does discuss with her husband is anybody's guess, although it is easy to suspect that their dialogue sounds like something out of a Pinter play. Vivien will ask a simple question, such as "Where shall I put the bookcases?" Whereupon Pinter, she says, "makes a long theatrical pause," and finally announces, "Against the wall." Their common preoccupation is their nine-year-old son Daniel, who has not seen Daddy's plays but has read Homecoming--to what effect no one can say.

This summer, Vivien will play Lady Macbeth opposite Paul Scofield at Stratford. Films scarcely interest her. She appeared in Alfie, playing the frumpish, pathetic housewife who gets an abortion, and she has a role in the forthcoming Pinter adaptation of Nicholas Mosley's novel, Accident. But that is the limit of her movie career, because she grew tired of the endless retakes. In one scene in Alfie, Michael Caine is called upon to slap her. "I was hit and hit all day long," she recalls, "until by the end of the afternoon my face was swollen out to here."

Vivien also admits that directors are troublesome, especially when they try to explain characterization to her. That includes her husband, who once directed Vivien in his television play, The Lovers. "Never again," she says. "It was dreadful. I'm not good with him when I'm under his direction. I'm nasty and feminine."

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