Introduction: Harold Pinter's Transmedial Histories

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2020

Radio provided Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter with new ways of experimenting with voice, silence, and absence. As they maximised radio’s potential to explore the ephemerality of language and non-linear narratives, the works they created were concerned with the medium itself. On radio, Beckett’s silences and Pinter’s pauses create a heightened sense of uncertainty and ambiguity. Their medium-conscious works also provided them with a platform through which they could experiment with their shared frustration with the inaccuracies of language. The article explores Pinter’s interest in Beckett’s work by drawing on Pinter’s letters to Richard Seaver, Patrick Magee, and Mick Goldstein from the Harold Pinter Archive. It then shows how Pinter’s own work is intermedial in its experimentation with new technologies such as radio. By pointing to examples within Pinter’s Landscape (1968) that speak to moments in Beckett’s Embers (1959), the parallels between these writers in their use of radio are identified. Finally, the article suggests that Pinter’s work is not merely derivative of Beckett’s but demonstrates how the radio drama of both writers is underwritten by an intermedial creative process.

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.

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...

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.

This article situates Harold Pinter's radio play A Slight Ache alongside the radio-playwriting protocols of its first producer, the British Broadcasting Corporation. In guidebooks for radio playwrights, the BBC's Drama Department promoted a clear and coherent on-air style. Pinter challenged this standard by building his play around a silent character and thus refusing to let his audience fall back on familiar methods of listening. Having written a radio play that gestured toward the theatre, Pinter did the opposite in A Slight Ache's stage adaptation, concealing visual elements as if glancing back at the airwaves. Both versions moved toward transcending the realism of The Birthday Party, whose blackout scene had already experimented with restricting stage drama to sound alone. The influence on Pinter's later stage style can be seen as early as Aston's monologue in The Caretaker, where complex lighting effects briefly transform a realistic setting into the "mindscape" of a radio play.

2015

I wish to thank wholeheartedly Cos Tonmoy who shared his ideas on postmodernism with me and lent me a number of books and materials. I would like to extend my thanks to my friends Asif Newaz, Maroof Ibn Mannan, Borhan Uddin and Parvin Akter who motivated me at times of distress. Finally, I want to thank my father for his endless support and my mother, who prayed for me and encouraged me throughout my project with great enthusiasm. vi

The contemporary British drama has witnessed ceaseless experimentation in the hands of Absurd dramatists like Beckett, Pinter, Ionesco. It has assumed complex implication as Absurd dramatists feel bewildered at the intriguing flux of existence. They remained desperate to devise adequate communicational forms to give expression to the deep-rooted feelings of angst, anxiety and absurdity. Hence this aspect of dramas seems to be complex enough to invite a close examination of communication in the major plays of a leading absurd dramatist, Harold Pinter. This paper is a critical attempt to evaluate how Harold Pinter differs and departs from the traditional mode of communication to what may be aptly called Post-Structuralist' mode of dramatic communication. The study is based on his text The Homecoming'.

Humanities, 2021

This article argues that cringe humour in British television had begun at least by the early 1960s and derived from a theatre history in which conventions of Naturalism were modified by emergent British writers working with European avant-garde motifs. The article makes the case by analysing the importance of cringe to the BBC sitcom Steptoe and Son, tracing its form and themes back to the ‘comedy of menace’ and ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ emblematised by the early work of playwright Harold Pinter. The article links the play that made Pinter’s reputation, The Birthday Party, to dramatic tropes and social commentary identified in Steptoe and Son and in other British sitcoms with cringe elements. The analysis not only discusses relationships between the different dramatic works on stage and screen but also pursues some of the other connections between sitcom and Pinter’s drama via networks of actors and contemporaneous discourses of critical commentary. It assesses the political stakes of cringe as a comic form, particularly the failure of cringe to impel political activism, and places this in the context of the repeated broadcast of Pinter’s plays and episodes of Steptoe and Son over an extended period.

Rock Pebbles, 2020

Critics have time and again deliberated upon the topic whether art and politics are inseparable. I am among the many who believe that it is inseparable as art mirrors life which is always embroiled in some controversy or the other. These controversies or complexities are the consequence of the political acts of not only the subjects of art but also the artist's own attempt to conform his readers to his own thought process. One such artist is Harold Pinter who not only participated in political debates, human rights rallies, antinuclear campaigns but also penned down through his plays and other works his political thoughts and vexation against social pathologies rampant all over the world. The present study is thus an attempt to fathom the political activism of Harold Pinter in a bid to understand better the pathology embedded in his plays directly political and thereby initiate measures to curb the universal injustice and exploitation committed against the weak, the poor, the marginalized and abjected groups.

2019

Harold Pinter was the most influential, provocative, and poetic dramatist of his generation. Moreover, he was best remembered by his ability to create dramatic poetry out of everyday speech, which was considered as his greatest contribution to modern drama. The greatest power of most of Pinter’s plays originates from the truth of a character’s feeling that always lies in the unspoken words or in what is known as “Pinter’s pauses”. For Pinter, the drama is not inherent in the speech of the characters existed on the stage but rather in the unknown world in the invisible end of most of his plays. The main aim of this research is to highlight the progress of Pinter's dramatic writing from the modernist features, which were familiar with the audience at that time, to the postmodern principles in order to portray the dilemma of the contemporary man. Through his innovative Pinteresque technique, Pinter reveal the typical postmodern human predicament in his dramas. Strikly speaking, Pin...