Silencing Rites in Pinter’s Plays

A Study of Menace, Pause and Silence in Harold Pinter’s Early Plays, 2012

The particular characteristics of Pinter’s theatre such as the theme of violence, the competitive interpersonal relationships, the implied unwillingness in communication between the characters and the distinctive use of silences and pauses, distinguish his work from the writers of the absurd. Pinter makes particular use of “Silences” and “Pauses” as theatrical techniques that present a non-verbal way of communication in his plays. The frequent use of these particular techniques in Pinter’s dialogue has urged some critics to coin new expressions such as “Pinteresque” or “Pinter Pause” in the vocabulary of drama to specify Pinter’s technique. One of the important objectives in this essay is to point out the fundamental significance and function of the “Silences” and “Pauses” in Pinter’s work and point out their distinction. I will discuss how the silences and pauses function in Pinter’s theatre as a non-verbal way of communication by creating fragments in the dialogue. The plays which will be analyzed in this essay are The Room, The Dumb Waiter, The Birthday Party, and The Caretaker. My objective in this essay is to explore the context of these plays with regard to the theme of menace. In the first chapter, I mainly aim to explore the menacing context of these plays regarding the structure of menace and the ways it takes place in each play separately. This analysis will be presented in relation to the spatial territory in which the characters are confined. My aim is also to describe why menace is presented in a theatrical sense. I have chosen to quote some significant passages of each play in each section to illustrate my purposes in the first chapter. The aim of the second chapter is to define the character types involved in the presentation of menace, “The Intruders” and “The Victims”, and to analyze the strategies they use in encounters with each other. After describing the character types I will explore in detail how “The Intruders” use linguistic strategies to confuse and subdue their victims and finally victimize them and how “The Victims” use strategies to cope with menace in order to survive. There are some passages quoted from the plays to facilitate the purpose of the second chapter. The objective in the third chapter is to define “Silences” and “Pauses” as theatrical techniques used in form of non-verbal communication between the characters. I will discuss, based on Peter Hall’s definition, how these techniques are significant in understanding a Pinter play for the readers and the actors who perform them on stage and will further explore the function of “Silences” and “Pauses” and their distinction in the context of the plays in question in this essay.

2019

The Silences and pauses, Harold Pinter has employed in his plays, have remarkably encapsulated his mastery of such theatrically effective techniques. Silence is not just a moment when characters keep silent and the audience cannot hear their utterances; it is a moment so pregnant with meanings that the readers find it difficult to find their way to the final meaning. Silence in Pinter’s plays are unexpectedly never silent. When it pervades, one has to think deeply of that moment. And when characters stop talking, one needs to contemplate their unsaid thoughts. This paper investigates the notions of fear, uncertainty, menace and death evoked when characters pause or keep silent in Pinter’s Silence and The Dumb Waiter. In other words, it is how those moments of silence mark a state of calmness on the one hand and how this state gives way to that of chaos and death on the other that this paper shall strive to prove with reference to the aforementioned plays.

This paper actively deals with the notion of silence as an element of absurdity in Harold Pinter’s play “The Dumb Waiter” (1960). In order to discuss this with greater detail, it is important to understand what absurdity is and how it is linked to the theatre of the absurd as well as its connection to the disenfranchised condition of human existence that ails modern man’s psyche obstructing his route to communication and purpose. Moreover, this paper elaborates on how silence is an element of absurdism diligently offering up a list of five main critics and their critiques and assessment over the language of silence employed by Pinter as an element of absurdity, and they include: “Poetics of Silence” (1970) by James R. Hollis, “Harold Pinter and The New British Theatre” (1997) by D. Keith Peacock, “Harold Pinter’s Politics: A Silence Beyond Echo” (2005), “Language and Silence” (1987) by Martin Esslin, and “A Question of Timing” (1995) by Martin S. Regal. Taking all of this into consideration, an analysis of Harold Pinter’s script will be implemented on the basis of silence as an active partaker in this play of absurdism posing a number of five main quotations that best represent Pinter’s formation of silence as not only a dramatic device, but a much more intense entity with its own voice and motives.

A Kaleidoscope of Harold Pinter's Plays, 1992

Critics have tried to approach Pinter’s plays from a variety of changing perspectives, which emerge as a result of the playwright’s inventiveness. Pinter who aims at and achieves perhaps the most original innovations in dramatic form best exemplifies the range and diversity of the contemporary English drama. In consequence, he has created a distinctive personal style. Any attempt to make an exhaustive study of Harold Pinter at this stage would be futile; selection was inevitable. This dissertation will concentrate on eight plays by the playwright under discussion to demonstrate the refinement and development of his technique which was unprecedented and therefore shocked everybody in 1960s but is highly appreciated now. Ankara : Faculty of Letters and Institute of Economics and Social Sciences, Bilkent Univ., 1992.

International Journal of Language and Literary Studies

The Silences and pauses, Harold Pinter has employed in his plays, have remarkably encapsulated his mastery of such theatrically effective techniques. It is not just a moment when characters keep silent and the audience cannot hear their utterances; it is a moment so pregnant with meanings that the reader finds it difficult to find his way to the final meaning. Silence in a Pinter play is unexpectedly never silent. When it pervades one has to think deeply of that moment. And when characters stop talking one needs to contemplate their unsaid thoughts. In his paper, I would like to make clear that my intention is to investigate the notions of fear, uncertainty, menace and death evoked when characters pause or keep silent in Pinter’s Silence and The Dumb Waiter. In other words, it is how those moments of silence mark a state of calmness on the one hand and how this state gives way to those of fear and eventually death on the other that I would like to explore and expound in the course o...

This paper aims at highlighting, by means of a synthetic approach in combination with analytical elements, some of the elements and peculiarities of Pinter?s dramas, which made him one of the most important playwrights of postmodern era. We will mainly focus on his silences and pauses he is so famous for, which became a trademark of his dialogue otherwise called the “Pinter Pause”. We will explore how failure in communication and the breakdown of human relations paved the way for ambiguity, nebulousness and menace. Our aim is to make clear Pinter?s ideas on silences and pauses when he used them, what he meant and we will reveal that the uttered and spoken word is important, but the most important is what is left unsaid, the idea understated beyond silences. Elements of postmodern literature found in his work made it difficult to understand and analyze Pinter?s work, often referred to and classified as illogical and irrational. Finally, we will try to restate once again the importance of silences and pauses expressed by 3 dots(…) in the Comedies of Menace, as the only way to penetrate through the real hidden significance of these dramas.

published in The Dhauli Review 2016 Link http://dhaulireview.com/newdhauli/showcontent.php?id=8&aid=131 Harold Pinter,Playwright, screenwriter, actor, theatre director, poet noted for his political polemics has shaped the vocabulary of modern drama. Not only in his plays but in his speeches the Nobel British Dramatist has been a serious critic of state brutalism irrespective of the national boundaries. His plays oscillate between two poles – the apex of power and the abyss of the torture. There are layers of meanings in his plays hinting at different levels of power play. The boredom of the torturer, the fun that he gets out of inflicting pain on the victim, the celebration of power by the man/men who run the country, the ignorance of the killer about the organization who hires him for a job all contribute to the making of "pinteresque " .

2018

Abstract. Introduction. The problem of political and mental disorder, which has been addressed to by many writers, – and the expressive figure of the British playwright, director and screenwriter, a poet Harold Pinter (1930-2008) is no exception. Apparently, his theatrical and acting performance has dwelled upon many issues, similarly significant to social and interpersonal spheres of life, since he stated that these may be diverse parts of similar mental activities. Methods. The complex descriptive analysis and historic cultural methods have been selected as the main tools to approach the issue under discussion. It also uses hermeneutic analysis and intertextual method in accessing the main Pinter’s style characteristics. Results and discussion. His writing blends violence, menace and terror, intimacy and authoritative oppression. The author build his own language of the highest metaphoricity up, arguing upon the concepts of gender and language, being and non-being, misogyny, total...

Zbornik Radova Filozofskog Fakulteta U Pristini, 2011

The British playwright Harold Pinter (1930-2008) is undoubtedly one of the greatest and most extraordinary modern playwrights, with the writing career which spanned over fifty years. The world Pinter depicts in his dramas is deeply political, violent, malevolent, and absurd at the same time, and is certainly reflective of dread, the precarious condition inhabited by most of contemporary humanity. A whole gallery of Pinter's characters (in his early plays) are not driven by ambition to make progress in such a world, they don't care to dispute the public arena, they are uninterested in changing the world for better or for worse. On the contrary, those characters are sad citizens of intimacy, fear, the horrific nature of which unmasks itself in claustrophobic rooms they are entrapped in, where power games, domination, and the struggle for liberation originate. Pinter's characters are obsessed only with their own survival, governed by the 'territorial imperative'. The paper aims at analyzing thematic preoccupations, dramatic devices and major dramatic and poetic elements of Pinter's plays, with the emphasis on his connection with the 'Theatre of the Absurd'. The focus is also on the concept of the hidden violence of language and linguistic absurdity as used by Pinter.

2017

This thesis offers a comprehensive critical examination of the intersections between Pinter’s political output – most notably his drama – and contemporary ethical thought. In order to so, I build on the recent few discussions of Pinter’s ethics by arguing that the ethical has always been a critical focus at every stage of Pinter’s work. In short, this study challenges both the earlier tendency that takes Pinter as an Absurdist and the late one that regards him as purely political. I shall then seek to explore the nexus between politics and ethics in various Pinter texts that deal explicitly or suggestively with the political. In order to so, I shall look at the question of alterity as that which structures the irreducible gap between ethics and politics in Pinter’s work. In particular, I approach the conception of otherness in Pinter in the double sense of the unknowable and that which always already inhabits the same. In either case, alterity, for Pinter, I argue, appears as a disr...