Ashes to Ashes.

THE London theater has been passing through a persistent scarcity of good new plays. A prominent symptom was Harold Pinter's latest gnomic, and incredibly tedious, Ashes to Ashes. It quickly expired in the West End, leaving the English stage hungrier than it has been for some time. As always, this pinched condition has provoked a scattering of hopeful revivals, including a good one of Pinter's The Homecoming. The startling contrast with Ashes to Ashes showed how far Pinter has fallen away from the genuine promise of his early work.

From the time when I first saw two of his one-act plays in a North London hall in the Fifties, it was clear that Pinter's flair as a theatrical craftsman was impressive. The novelty in his box of theatrical tricks -- fresh and innova- tive then, but much satirized now -- was his discovery that the most banal conversation can be heightened and given apparent "meaning" by introducing arbitrary pauses among lines of dialogue. This manipulative stunt opened a kind of vacuum which critics rushed to fill with their own speculations about unspoken profundity and "menace." Pinter found himself labeled as a sort of theatrical guru, whose work hinted at revelations about the depths of human experience, life and death, etc.

This was surprising, because Pinter then had absolutely no intellectual pretensions. He had finished secondary school, bypassed university to become an actor, and moved on to playwriting. It was his peculiar fortune to arrive just as British theater was undergoing a curious transformation. Where most playwrights before the mid-Fifties had played for the audience in the tradi- tional manner, the new crop began to play at the audience, to "make them think."

By the Sixties the association of Pinter with a stage work was enough to ensure respectful attention. There now existed a style called "Pinterism," deployed most successfully by Pinter himself. The "pause" mannerism had become his particular property, along with a trick of arbitrary repetition which he may or may not have borrowed from American writers like Ernest Hemingway. He was now the proprietor of a mystique in contemporary theater like that of Samuel Beckett, complete with intimations of mystery and awesome (if always rather unspecific) wisdom lurking in the hidden depths of his plays.

After a while, Pinter began to show signs of believing his critical adulation. He left his theatrical wife for a literary lioness, biographer Antonia Fraser. The pair and their friends assumed the role of an intellectual elite to show the nation the error(s) of its ways; they convened a salon of suburban champagne socialists like novelist Margaret Drabble and playwright John Mortimer. This little radical-chic klatsch provoked more mocking public laughter than political change.

Pinter's public utterances betrayed a definite etiolation of his sense of humor. He published a book of prose and dreadful poetry. He traveled to Turkey with Arthur Miller and allowed himself to be used for propaganda purposes by a Kurdish terrorist organization; he then insulted the American ambassador over dinner with accusations that the embassy was encouraging torture in Turkey. On his return to England he (with Miller) published a bragging article about all this fun and games in a prominent London Sunday newspaper. Later he recorded a half-hour television speech, denouncing Reagan and the Americans for "killing hundreds of thousands of people a day."

While the thick cloud of critical pretentiousness continued to intoxicate Pinter, he did develop another side of his talent as a superb director of other people's work. And his own plays were changing. By the Eighties he had adopted a messianic air, writing down to his audience in over-mannered theatrical statements which were elliptical, vaguely indignant, and -- he said -- "political." His characters, never very rounded, now began to flatten into the cardboard figures of agitprop. In Mountain Language, for example, he cre- ated a brief sentimental sketch of members of a minority who suffer for speak- ing their own language. The apparent idea was that oppression was a bad thing. Another short play (all his new plays were now short) made the same profound point about torture.

Ashes to Ashes is the latest work in this new canon. It is a half-hour of cryptic hints about marital cruelty and political oppression, exchanged in and around an easy chair in a living room by a bland man and a woman who is pos- sibly his abused wife. There is no trace of humor. During thirty minutes of banal, incredibly tedious chat they pause a lot, squirm, glare, breathe hard, and get up and sit down once or twice; at last the lights go down. Critical reaction was mixed. A few apostates thought there was nothing to the piece. Among the faithful, Alistair Macaulay of the Financial Times was probably the most dazzled (and incoherent): "it may be important to say that not understanding Pinter is a very great pleasure. To feel the elusiveness of his meaning is, in fact, to come very close to its essence."

If you emetize like that over a playwright long enough, he will --even if he is a saint -- eventually stop wiping it off his face and come down with a case of ego-rot. Maybe a good Samaritan could found a clinic and treat Pinter for critical intoxication. With luck, he might dry out, learn to laugh again, and even write a good play.