Reviewer response to Pinter's "The caretaker

Roczniki Humanistyczne, 2017

The article discusses translations of three plays by Harold Pinter (The Room, Party Time, Moonlight) which so far have not been staged in Poland. The plays are significant since they represent three major stages in Pinter's playwriting career while simultaneously enriching and extending Pinter's predominant motifs and concerns. So as to reflect the inherent duality of the dramatic text (which can be treated both as a literary work and a script for potential performance), the article investigates the translations of the plays by placing emphasis on their literary as well as theatrical features. This is done with a view to presenting challenges facing translators of Pinter's plays and to reflect on selected translator's choices and strategies which might have a bearing on the interpretation by potential readers as well as theatre practitioners. It is especially relevant in the light of Pinter's determination in underlining the importance of the dramatic text in the actual performance.

Philologia, 2007

Plays by Harold Pinter have always attracted attention from theatre and literary critics. In the last 50 years, his opus received a vast variety of domestic as well as international reviews, the Slovene space being no exception. This article sets out a selection of the most prominent and influential productions of his plays on the world and Slovene stages, and adds selected analyses of and comments on the critical views provided by Pinter himself and by others. Some representative reactions to Pinter’s winning the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature are presented in the last part of the paper.

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.

IJELLH, 2019

Harold Pinter has explored violence on many levels, ranging from the most palpable, visible forms to the most subtle. Taking recourse to Johan Galtung's theory of violence and its typology as presented in his violence triangle, I have attempted to probe in this paper how direct, structural and cultural violence is projected in Pinter's play, The Caretaker. Direct violence, which has a visibility factor is most often related to the invisible cultural and structural violence and is time and again the outcome of these subtle forms of violence. But it is a fact that direct violence does not affect many people as cultural and structural violence, which constitute the hidden but major part of the iceberg. The world has faced more violence through racism, poverty, religious fanaticism, unemployment, famine, illiteracy, sexism, conservative ideologies and so on. The paper attempts to establish that Pinter has through the play, The Caretaker, has presented a keen vision of our essentially violent world, which is intensified by the notion of menace and man's basic insecurity. Harold Pinter, the 2005 Nobel Laureate for literature, was not only a popular playwright, poet, screenwriter, short story writer, director, actor etc. but also a political activist who fought against the abuse of power in the familial, social and political sphere. As a pacifist, Pinter had always fought against violence, torture, and oppression. In his early comedies of menace, the latter political plays as well as his anti-war poems, an element of disillusionment

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2013

The action of the play takes place in a junk-filled room of a tumbledo Hern, 1982:21). Inner guilt is a cry for, identity, security and existence. In The Caretaker, all these terms are defined by the relationship among Davies, Aston and Mick. The sense of guilt is underlined by the lack of identity positions and, to an extent, by their clinging reliance on physical objects. It is significant that we are not introduced to the characters by way of a formal exposition. This would imply that they are familiar and known from the beginning. The sense of guilt does not only bel Davies from the Paradise has uprooted him not only in the ontological aspect but also in the psychological respect. Davies himself is not an innocent victim but a victimizer too. He is a victim of a system, which gives him a name but forces him to use another. He combats injustice with inertia and self-righteousness. This article aims at analyzing the play, The Caretaker.

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

2022

To sum up what we have tackled in this paper, the drama of Harold Pinter develops in an environment of intrigue, where the surfaces of life are realistically portrayed, but the patterns underlying them remain elusive. This tension characterises Pinter's work. Despite the vivid realism of his discourse, his characters often behave more like figures in a dream than people with whom one can readily relate. This makes it difficult for the reader to connect with the characters. In The Homecoming, Jessie and Ruth are two characters engaged in a conversation and their reasons for communicating were to create an identity concerning one another. Pinter wishes to decentralize the patriarchal structure of family and society. Although Jessie has died her absence had already left a great hole in the family as well as in the house, and her presence can be practically felt in the walls of the family home. Her absence had already created a huge gap. On the other hand, there is an obvious parallel made between her and the dead Max’s wife, Jessie. Ruth occupies Jessie's position in the family, and this is obvious in the details of the play. While in The Caretaker the characters fully develop Pinter's themes and tactics introduced in The Homecoming and refined in his subsequent works. It's a Pinteresque play, with its characters, metaphor, excellent language, and stagecraft. He changed course to avoid imitating himself. Increasingly, he shifted his atmosphere, creating plays with middle-class characters, leaving behind the Cockney vocabulary of the earlier plays but exhibiting an ear for the follies and banalities of middle-class discourse and what was being communicated behind its affectations.

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...

The life in post-war period has been adverse due to the catalyst World War II for the infliction of human suffering. The period in the second half of the 20th century has been an awful stage copious in predicament and misery. Harold Pinter and other absurdist playwrights have investigated the circumstances in the post-war period in which every kind of suffering haunted the humans. Existential dilemma has been the main problem that kept the human movement twisting—for they have to earn to keep their being. Breakdown of communication and identity crisis has been the issue among the people of 20th century, and is aptly reflected in the play. The attitude of hegemony found among individuals is revealed mostly through the episodes of the play.

International Journal of Research, 2015

The present paper attempts study playwright .Pinter is regarded as a representative of Absurd Drama. Pinter observes the comic side of the Absurd. As Pinter's dramas are drama of language, attempt has been made to an analysis of some dialogues of his plays from the absurdist point of view. Pinter, a modern dramatist who has exerted tremendous influence on the other writers .So a reassessment of the writer is an enriching and valuable experience .The paper also attempts in positioning Pinter's play in the contemporary milieu.