The plays we will be studying are available in various editions. If you want to buy the texts singly, the following student editions (with notes etc.) are recommended.
Pinter, Harold The Birthday Party (1960). (London: Faber, 1991) [ISBN 9780571160785].
Pinter, Harold The Caretaker (1960). (London: Faber, 1991). [ISBN 9780571160792].
The Caretaker, The Birthday Party and The Homecoming are avialable in a single volume edited by Bill Naismith, entitled Harold Pinter: Faber Critical Guide: The Caretaker, The Birthday Party, The Homecoming (London: Faber, 2000) [ISBN 9780571197811]. This has useful critical essays as well as the plays themselves.
Each of these plays can also be found in different volumes of Pinter’s collected plays, which are now published by Faber (although you may find them in libraries or second-hand bookshops in the Methuen imprint under which they first appeared.) If you want to read more of Pinter’s plays, or use this chapter of the subject guide as a way into the study of other plays (e.g. The Homecoming) on which you would prefer to concentrate, it may make more sense to buy one or more volumes of the collected plays, since these usually contain four to five of Pinter’s plays and represent better value for money than buying single-play editions.
There is an additional reason for using these collections, which is that they contain short but extremely revealing introductions by Pinter. Your attention is drawn especially to ‘Writing for the Theatre’ in Volume 1 of the collected plays, which contains The Birthday Party (London: Faber, 1996) [ISBN 0571178448] and ‘Writing for Myself’ in Volume 2, which contains The Caretaker (London: Faber, 1996) [ISBN 0571177441]. The Homecoming can be found in Volume 3 of the collected plays (London: Faber, 1996) [ISBN 0571178456].
Batty, Marc Harold Pinter. (Plymouth: Northcote House, 2000) [ISBN 0746309406].
*Billington, Michael The Life and Work of Harold Pinter. (London: Faber, 1996) [ISBN 057117103]. This is the authorised biography, written with Pinter’s aid and permission. As well as providing a clear account of Pinter’s life, relationships and politics, it contains useful discussion of all the major plays.
Dukore, Bernard. Harold Pinter. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982) [ISBN 03332891153]. A brief but useful overview of Pinter’s career.
Esslin, Martin Pinter the Playwright. (London: Methuen, 1992) fifth edition [ISBN 0413668608]. Useful as an introduction to Pinter’s early plays. The first edition of this text, which has been regularly updated as Pinter’s career has evolved and is still commonly found in libraries, was entitled The Peopled Wound: The Plays of Harold Pinter. (London: Methuen, 1970) [ISBN 1416109101].
*Esslin, Martin The Theatre of the Absurd. (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1982) third edition [ISBN 0413668606]. Still the most useful contextualisation of Pinter’s early work in the wider theatrical history of the post-war era.
*Gussow, Mel Conversations with Pinter. (London: Nick Hern, 1994) [ISBN 1854592017]. In some ways the most interesting critical book on Pinter, insofar as the ideas are tested out on, and responded to, by Pinter himself.
Knowles, Ronald The Birthday Party and The Caretaker: Text and Performance. (London: Macmillan, 1988) [ISBN 0333422716]. An important account of the practical dramaturgy of Pinter’s early work.
Knowles, Ronald Understanding Harold Pinter. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1995) [ISBN 1570030448].
Merritt, Susan Hollis Pinter in Play: Critical Strategies and the Plays of Harold Pinter. (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1995) [ISBN 0822316749].
Naismith, Bill Harold Pinter: Faber Critical Guide: ‘The Caretaker’, ‘The Birthday Party’, ‘The Homecoming’. (London: Faber, 2000) [ISBN 0571197817].
*Scott, Michael (ed.) The Birthday Party, The Caretaker and The Homecoming. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986) [ISBN 0333352718]. A key collection of reviews and essays on three of the most important early plays.
* Especially recommended
There’s a widespread view that Pinter was one of the most important modern British playwrights, whose only possible rivals are Tom Stoppard and Alan Ayckbourn. There has rarely been a time in the past four decades in which his work has not been in performance on stage, television or the cinema (he was probably Britain’s most famous screenplay writer). He was the only British playwright who has a critical publication, The Pinter Review, which is dedicated entirely to his work. But Pinter has had broader recognition, too, as is suggested by the fact that his name has passed into everyday language. The Oxford Shorter English Dictionary lists ‘Pinteresque’, ‘Pinterian’ and ‘Pinterish’ as terms descriptive of an atmosphere or situation characterised by enigma or menace. Such terminology applies more specifically to artistic work that uses pauses, silences, inconclusive or evasive dialogue, often of a highly clichéd nature, ambiguous memory games and threatening visitations.
It has proved difficult to capture and classify Pinter’s essential qualities as a dramatist more precisely. This has something to do with the variety of work that he produced over several decades. His career is sometimes presented as falling into three distinct phases.
1. The first phase runs roughly from The Room and The Birthday Party, both written in 1957, to The Homecoming of 1964. This group of plays, to which The Caretaker also belongs, are sometimes described as ‘the comedies of menace’, though this is not a label with which Pinter himself was happy.
2. Pinter’s ‘middle group’ comprises a series of poetic dramas sometimes described as ‘the memory plays’, which are quite different in character from the early plays. This runs from Landscape, written in 1967, to Betrayal of 1978.
3. The third phase comprises what are sometimes referred to as Pinter’s ‘political plays’, which run from One for the Road of 1984 to Party Time of 1991.
Critics have been divided as to whether Pinter entered a fourth and final phase after the appearance of Moonlight in 1993, or whether he was simply returning to old ground and recycling material from his first two ‘phases’, in a way that suggests his inspiration finally dried up. It is on the first and second group of plays, particularly the first, that Pinter’s current reputation is largely based. Critics are much more sharply divided over the third, so-called ‘political phase’ of Pinter’s career and over his return to full-length drama in Moonlight.
The early reviews of Pinter’s work have become legendary for their inability to understand Pinter’s innovative style. The first London production of The Birthday Party was a disastrous failure, being taken off after a single week in which it attracted largely hostile notices, including one in the Financial Times which welcomed a new member of what it called ‘the school of random dottiness’. The Evening Standard was equally derogatory:
It will be best enjoyed by those who believe that obscurity is its own reward…Pinter just isn’t funny enough.
Activity
If you are reading Pinter for the first time, begin with The Birthday Party. Try to identify, as you read, what makes him so challenging. What difficulties do you have as you read? Try to be as precise as possible about these. When you have finished reading the play, try to identify more precisely how Pinter is different from earlier dramatists whose work you have read, especially in terms of technique. You will have read some Shakespeare by this stage of your subject. Begin by analysing how the structure and development of The Birthday Party differs from, say, Hamlet or The Tempest. Now think about the humour of the play. How funny is it? What is funny? Is the humour primarily verbal or situational?
In seeking to characterise even so apparently coherent a group of plays as Pinter’s early work, one is not helped by the author’s own notorious evasiveness when confronted with queries about the meanings of his plays. In 1970, on being presented with the Hamburg Shakespeare Prize, Pinter recalled:
Someone asked me what my work was ‘about’. I replied with no thought at all and merely to frustrate this line of enquiry: ‘The weasel under the cocktail cabinet’. Over the years I have seen that remark quoted in a number of learned columns…But for me that remark meant precisely nothing.
Activity
Notwithstanding Pinter’s disclaimer, in what ways might his response be a useful means of understanding what his plays are ‘about’?
The most celebrated instance of his frustration with the puzzled response of his viewers is Pinter’s reply to a letter from one theatre-goer which read as follows:
Dear Sir, I would be obliged if you would kindly explain to me the meaning of your play The Birthday Party. These are the points which I do not understand: 1. Who are the two men? 2. Where did Stanley come from? 3. Were they all supposed to be normal? You will appreciate that without the answers to my questions I cannot fully understand your play.
Pinter is said to have replied as follows:
Dear Madam, I would be obliged if you would kindly explain to me the meaning of your letter. These are the points I do not understand: 1. Who are you? 2. Where do you come from? 3. Are you supposed to be normal? You will appreciate that without the answers to your questions I cannot fully understand your letter.’
One useful approach to understanding the early plays is to think about where Pinter is coming from as a playwright. Pinter is generally linked first and foremost to the post-war European tradition of ‘absurd’ drama, an influence which was particularly emphasised by directors of the early productions of Pinter’s plays such as Peter Hall. Absurd drama is most famously associated with Ionesco and Beckett. There’s certainly considerable reason to view Pinter as belonging to this tradition. Ionesco’s play The Bald Prima Donna was staged in London, in 1956, the year before Pinter wrote his first play, The Room. Ionesco’s The New Tenant has been described by several critics as an obvious influence on The Room and the opening of The Birthday Party strongly recalls elements of Ionesco’s play Victims of Duty.
Beckett is generally considered an even stronger influence. Pinter encountered Beckett’s prose for the first time while touring in Ireland in 1949 and declared himself to have been ‘quite bowled over by those novels’. He subsequently became an ardent fan of Beckett’s plays, the most famous of which, Waiting for Godot was first performed in London in 1955, the year before The Bald Prima Donna. In 1970, Pinter declared Beckett to be ‘the greatest writer of our time’ and, from 1964 onwards, regularly sent Beckett his plays to comment on as they were being written. To some early critics, the apparent similarity between Pinter and Beckett amounted to a case of near plagiarism. For instance, the Daily Telegraph review of The Caretaker commented:
Had Waiting for Godot never been written, this piece would be judged to be masterly. As it is, it appeared to be excessively derivative, almost to the point of parody.
Activity
If you have not already studied Waiting for Godot, you are strongly recommended to read it now. This will not only enable you to understand Pinter better, but will give you scope to answer a comparative question on Beckett and Pinter, or modern drama more generally, in Section C of the examination. Once you have read it, consider the response of the Daily Telegraph in more detail. What parallels can you find, in terms of theme, motif and technique between Waiting for Godot and The Caretaker? To begin with, you might consider the significance of boots, tramps, problems of communication, physical and mental decay and waiting.
If you have read Beckett’s Endgame, consider the ways in which setting is deployed in both plays. Think also about questions of structure, technique and form. Do these various parallels amount to ‘near plagiarism’? In what ways does Pinter ‘adapt’ Beckett? If you are particularly interested in contextualising Pinter within the European tradition, you might also want to read one of the Ionesco plays mentioned earlier and ask yourself the same kind of questions as you have been asked about Beckett and Pinter.
Now consider the ways in which The Birthday Party might be considered to be influenced by Beckett. Again, in what ways does it constitute a departure
from Beckett?
For a fuller discussion of Pinter’s relationship to playwrights like Beckett and Ionesco, consult Esslin’s Theatre of the Absurd.
In Understanding Harold Pinter, Ronald Knowles argues that the early ‘insistent comparisons of Beckett and Ionesco with Pinter’s most famous early plays was wildly indulged and became the reviewers’ way of not confronting what made the plays unique’. For Knowles, this uniqueness resides in the way that early Pinter fuses the continental tradition of the ‘absurd’ with a domestic tradition of dramatic realism, or even naturalism, which was characteristic of so much British drama of the 1950s. This so-called ‘kitchen-sink’ school of drama is especially associated with figures like Alun Owen, Bernard Kops, Arnold Wesker, and John Osborne to a lesser extent, and became enormously influential.
Activity
You might want to read a play written in the 1950s or early 1960s by either Osborne or, preferably, Wesker. Try to work out what thematic and stylistic features either of these playwrights has in common with Pinter. This is not essential but performing this exercise would enhance your ability to answer not just questions on Pinter but Section C comparative questions.
Pinter’s early work often has the same kind of social focus, material location and style of apparently gritty realism as the kitchen-sink school. The Caretaker, for instance, is set in a run-down house which appears to be in a deprived inner-city area. A half-page of directions at the beginning of The Caretaker establishes a naturalistic sense of milieu through a detailed inventory of the stage furniture; the clutter includes, of course, a kitchen sink, as if Pinter is deliberately advertising his links to the school of drama associated with Owen and Wesker. The characters are difficult to place socially with any exactitude, but they are certainly not the middle-class figures generally privileged in earlier British drama of the twentieth century, comprising as they do the down-at-heels Davies, the former mental patient Aston and his brother Mick, a small-time builder. All are presented very naturalistically, as if the audience is being given an unmediated slice of life, voyeuristically sharing their predicament through the invisible fourth wall of proscenium-arch drama.
There are repeated references in The Caretaker to issues such as class mobility and conflict (remember Mick’s dreams of transforming the house into a gentrified paradise, Davies’ claim that he has eaten with the best and his parodically elegant dress at the beginning of Act 3). Other issues – pertinent then and now – which are alluded to include the treatment of the mentally ill, homelessness, immigration and slum land-lording, which hint teasingly at the kind of engagement with social issues characteristic of mainstream ‘kitchen-sink’ realism.
Activity
Now consider the social setting in The Birthday Party. What social issues does the play seem to be concerned with? How consistent, or deep, is the play’s engagement with such topics? Is it more preoccupied instead with psychological or philosophical issues?
One nonetheless needs to approach the question of realism in Pinter’s plays with some caution. On the one hand, ‘Writing for Myself’, reproduced as the preface to volume 2 of the collected plays, comments: ‘I wouldn’t know a symbol if I saw one’ and continues:
When a character cannot be comfortably defined or understood in terms of the familiar, the tendency is to perch him on a symbolic shelf, out of harm’s way.
In Pinter’s view at least, his plays are not allegories, nor do they embody a preconceived system of moral or philosophical ideas, which is given dramatic life on stage. At the same time, Pinter also famously commented in ‘Writing for Myself’:
I’d say that what goes on in my plays is realistic, but what I’m doing is not realism.
One obvious difference between Pinter and the ‘kitchen-sink’ school is that early Pinter rejects any propagandist or polemical function for his plays. In ‘Writing for Myself’ he says: ‘I’m not committed as a writer, in the usual sense of the term, either religiously or politically. And I’m not conscious of any particular social function.’
Activity
Carefully read ‘Writing for Myself’. Do you feel there is any inconsistency in Pinter’s argument? Can you find any symbols in either play? Consider the statue of the Buddha in The Caretaker. Is this a symbol? If so, of what? What is the dramatic function of the statue in the play?
More fundamentally still, perhaps, Pinter sees realism as a theatrical style which is not necessarily at all realistic in the sense of being faithful to our existential experience of daily life. As a formal mode, in other words, realism depends on conventions which are just as artificial as those associated with surrealist, expressionist or even heroic verse drama except that we’re probably not so familiar with the latter and consequently remain more aware of their conventional nature.
In realist drama, there’s generally a neat rationality of design expressed, typically, by clear beginnings, middles and ends. Conflicts and enigmas which exist in the early part of the play tend to get resolved in a progressively stronger series of climaxes, as the plot unfolds and develops, more or less logically, from premises which are embodied in the first act or scene. The meaning or meanings of the play, equally, tend to gather steadily into a coherent and unified whole by the end of the performance. Within this larger process, characters tend to behave in ways which predictably reflect their circumstances, personalities and motivations. In realist drama, moreover, language serves to reveal a character’s personality or feelings and thoughts in a clear and accessible way. Another important characteristic of realist drama is that the audience is invited to empathise with the predicaments of characters that they are presented with through what has been described as ‘the willing suspension of disbelief’. Finally, perhaps, realist drama tends to belong to fairly distinct genres, whether of comedy, tragedy, romance, etc.
One useful way to think about Pinter, then, is to see him as bearing the same kind of relationship to traditional realist drama as a modernist novelist like Joyce does to traditional realist narrative such as Thomas Hardy’s (and Pinter was a great admirer of Joyce, especially Ulysses).
Activity
Think again now about the designs of the two plays. To what extent do they seem arbitrary, repetitious and directionless? Do the divisions of the play into acts and scenes necessarily correspond to developments in the action? To what extent do plot and climax provide the dramatic elements in the plays? If not, what is it that provides the drama (even, at times, almost unbearable suspense) of Pinter’s plays? Can either play be said to be resolved according to the norms of conventional dramatic endings?
In terms of characterisation, too, Pinter deviates markedly from the norms of realist drama. Pinter’s interest is not so much in characters’ origins, development, motivation or psychology but in their existential situation. What he attempts to dramatise is what he calls ‘the living moment’ of a situation or relationship. In some respects, Pinter appears to be offering us something akin to the modernist epiphany, a moment of intense awareness of the essential properties of the character or situation he presents. In contrast to the modernist epiphany, however, Pinter’s epiphanies do not necessarily lead to illumination for the audience unless one understands that what he is illuminating is precisely the opacity or unknowability of character. In Pinter there’s almost always a strong tension between characters’ public personae, and the private preoccupations which underlie them. This relationship is characteristically fraught and oblique, so that the audience is unable to accurately judge the truth of the hints or memories the characters may offer.
Thus we remain unsure to the end of The Birthday Party about the characters’ identity at the most basic level.
Activity
Who is Goldberg? Why does he have several first names? Why does he get so upset when McCann calls him ‘Simey’? Does he invent a role/identity depending on the situations in which he finds himself? How differently does he behave towards Lulu, compared with Stanley? Why is he sometimes genial and sometimes terrifying?
In Pinter’s plays, we are left troubled and uncertain, relying on minds which are damaged by paranoia, aggression or suffering for accounts of the prior experiences to which each character refers. Our predicament as readers is, in this respect, something like the situation we face with the unreliable narrators of modernist fiction.
Activity
How are we to be sure that Stanley is a reliable narrator of the events which have befallen him in his past? What evidence is there that he is, in fact, paranoid?
Pinter is equally unconventional in terms of the question of empathy.
Activity
What are we supposed to feel about the various characters? Consider The Caretaker. Is Mick, for instance, the object of our sympathy or aversion in terms of his attitude towards his brother? Is Davies as much a victim as Aston, albeit in different ways, or is he a cuckoo-like figure bent on displacing someone whom he identifies as weaker than himself? Is he constantly at the mercy of circumstance or a cunning and ruthless manipulator of events around him? Are these issues ever resolved? Can they be? In any case, how far do we engage in the relationships and struggles going on onstage? Do we enter the characters’ predicament as we are invited to do in realist drama, or does Pinter deliberately keep us at arm’s length, so that we remain detached from their struggles and preoccupations, as is the case with some modernist writing?
The uncertainty we experience as an audience perhaps derives, above all else, from the fact that the language which the characters use does not necessarily work to advance understanding in any conventional sense. More often than not, language in Pinter plays is opaque, illogical or inarticulate, despite – or more probably because – it seems so everyday and accessible, so vernacular in its range. The slipperiness, or from another perspective, the densely material nature of language, often prevents understanding between speakers. As Mick says to Davies, ‘Every word you speak is open to any number of different interpretations.’ In part this is because the language a character uses often contradicts the emotion or psychological state which accompanies it. In other words, there’s a disconcerting gap between the matter communicated and the manner in which it is communicated. Thus the tone or style of delivery can communicate a good deal more than the semantic content of an utterance.
Pinter’s use of language is central to his attempt to overthrow the assumptions of realism. Traditional realist stage dialogue, in Martin Esslin’s words:
…has always greatly overestimated the degree of logic which governs the use of language. People on stage have…always spoken more clearly, more directly, more to the purpose than they would ever have done in real life.
And this comment holds as true for naturalism as it does for realism, as is quickly evident if you read certain of Ibsen’s plays, where a character can at times speak for minutes at a time without a pause, a grammatical mistake, repetition or contradiction. By contrast, Pinter’s characters often employ an apparently disjointed, contradictory or rambling mode of speaking, for example when Aston recalls his treatment in the psychiatric hospital. This is a sort of exteriorised interior monologue, which seems as much directed to himself as Davies and is organised in a fashion similar to the stream-of-consciousness technique pioneered by modernists like Joyce. As this speech suggests, repetition, circularity and contradiction often reveal a great deal more about a character’s psychological state than its discursive content might suggest.
Crucial to Pinter’s use of language are his notorious pauses and silences. On the one hand, they can be understood as part of Pinter’s accurate recording of what happens in everyday conversation, particularly in situations of reflection or, more obviously, in situations of stress or uncertainty. It’s important to note in this respect that in early Pinter silence takes more than one form. As he puts it in another important essay called ‘Writing for the Theatre’, which forms the preface to volume one of the Methuen edition of his plays:
There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it...The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don’t hear.
A good instance of this occurs in Davies’ speech in The Caretaker about his experience at the monastery where, beneath the torrent of description, we intuit his helplessness and insecurity. Equally, the pause, or physical silence, is characteristically a mode of revelation; for example, it often acts as a barometer which measures changing patterns of domination and subordination between characters. What we’re often being given at these moments, then, is dramatic information rather than discursive information of the sort we’re used to in realist drama. Physical silence is also, paradoxically, often a mode of action, whether of concealment, of refusal, of aggression, or of an attempt to come to terms with what has created the silence. Pinter himself suggests that:
…a silence...means that something has happened to create the impossibility of anyone speaking for a certain amount of time – until they can recover from whatever happened before the silence.
Seen from this perspective, Pinter plays are not so much about the failure of communication as an intrinsic or inevitable part of human relations as the way that communication is deliberately evaded because of the pain that true connection involves. As Pinter once said:
Communication is too alarming. To enter someone else’s life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.
Reread The Birthday Party, paying particular attention to the longer speeches of Stanley and Goldberg. How are these structured? Is there any logic to these speeches? What is their dramatic effect? Now reread The Caretaker. Make a list of moments in the play when silences and pauses are used. What is their dramatic effect? To what extent do they reveal, or conceal, the characters’ psychological/ emotional states? Make a list from either play of moments when characters misunderstand, refuse to listen to, or talk across each other. What do these moments reveal about Pinter’s conception of the efficacy of human communication?
Activity
Think about where you would place Pinter’s plays in broader generic terms. Do they belong to farce, or comedy, or tragedy? How inter-mixed are these genres?
From one point of view, Pinter can seem to be working on the bleaker fringes of tragedy. Pinter’s characters are often prey to forces which are much more powerful than them. Pinter once said about the early phase of his work that it ‘dealt with the individual at the mercy of an authoritarian system.’
Activity
This seems to contradict Pinter’s position in ‘Writing for Myself’, in which he disavows any polemical purpose. Can the two positions be reconciled? What is the significance of McCann’s references to the Irish situation, and Goldberg’s role as a Jewish interrogator/persecutor in The Birthday Party?
In both plays there is often a sense that some kind of malevolent or arbitrary visitation from an unfathomable exterior power is being visited upon a character, that persecution is a fact of everyday life. In this respect, Pinter’s work strongly recalls that of Kafka, a favourite author of Pinter’s from an early age (he wrote a screenplay of Kafka’s The Trial). Remembering his first readings of Kafka, Pinter later commented:
I thought something’s going on here which is going on in me too.
Perhaps the best example of this Kafkaesque motif comes in The Birthday Party, which resembles The Trial where the protagonist is summoned on his birthday by two representatives of authority to answer charges which are never specified. But there are Kafkaesque elements in The Caretaker, too, where Aston seems to have been the unwilling victim of some appalling bureaucratic conception of what normality should consist of, a course of treatment which is even more chilling since it has been undertaken for supposedly ‘compassionate’ reasons. The Hothouse, another early play, is set in a mental hospital which again functions as a metaphor for an increasingly oppressive, impersonal and bureaucratised social system. In depicting such persecution Pinter, like Kafka, does not rely on melodrama. Instead he stresses the way that a mundane, familiar and safe world can suddenly become grotesquely transformed into a bizarre and threatening one by an apparently minor incident like an unexpected visit. As Pinter commented of Kafka’s work:
The nightmare of that world is precisely its ordinariness. That is what is so frightening and strong.
What makes Pinter’s work even more chilling, paradoxically, is the mixture of these elements of his plays with a strong strain of comedy, even farce – think of the bag-passing routine or Davies’ problems with his trousers in The Caretaker, Davies’ shaggy dog stories, the quick clown-like exchanges between Aston and Davies over the problem of wind in bed. Some of Pinter’s plays have been played at times almost as straight comedy, an example being Sam Mendes’ revival of The Birthday Party in 1994 which played it almost as an old-fashioned television sit-com. Think about Goldberg’s witty one-liners in this respect. However, it may be that the purpose of the comedy is, in the end, to reinforce the atmosphere of menace and insecurity which a play like The Caretaker is primarily concerned to create. As Pinter once commented:
The Caretaker is funny up to a point. Beyond that point, it ceases to be funny, and it was because of that point that I wrote it.
The nature and genre of Pinter’s early plays remain, therefore, ambiguous. Consider Pinter’s belief, again expressed in ‘Writing for Myself’ that, ‘the old categories of comedy and tragedy and farce are irrelevant’, a comment which provides another parallel with the views of modernist writers like Lawrence and Woolf in their deliberate attempt to confound traditional generic classification.
By the end of this chapter and having studied the two Pinter plays and some of the recommended secondary reading, you should be able to:
As you will see from the sample examination paper at the end of this subject guide, you cannot necessarily expect a question on Pinter in the examination. It is likely, however, that there will be questions on drama which you could use Pinter to answer. Questions 1 and 2 should therefore be treated more as questions to organise your ideas about Pinter, or to practise essay writing, in preparation for the examination. Questions 3 and 4 are typical of the kind of more general questions on drama that you can expect in the examination. You can, of course, use Pinter to answer any more general questions on the examination which are appropriate.
1. ‘Pinter’s great achievement is in his triumph over genre and convention in art.’ (Ronald Knowles) Discuss.
2. ‘I want to present living people to the audience, worthy of their interest because they are, they exist, not because of any moral the author might draw from them.’ (Harold Pinter) To what extent does Pinter succeed in this aim?
3. ‘Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must change.’ (Bertolt Brecht) How has post-war drama responded to this challenge?
4. ‘To doubt becomes a way of definition.’ (W.H. Auden) How true is this of any twentieth-century dramatist/s you have studied?
In this chapter, we have chosen to focus on a small, even narrow, selection of Pinter’s output. As indicated earlier, you may want to study other Pinter plays, particularly more recent ones, rather than those on which this chapter has concentrated. Or you may wish to study one of the plays discussed here in combination with one or more other Pinter plays. This is perfectly acceptable. You might want to study Pinter alongside other playwrights. An obvious candidate, given Pinter’s acknowledgement of Beckett’s influence on him, is Samuel Beckett. You might begin such an exercise by comparing an early Pinter play with Waiting for Godot or Endgame and trying to work out both what Pinter has in common with Beckett in terms of technique, theme and vision, as well as identifying how they differ.