Harold Pinter’s Early Revue Sketches

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

This article introduces Pinter as an early practitioner of the Theater of the Absurd as well as an existentialist. In his plays The Dumb Waiter, The Room and Birthday Party absurd is presented in its different aspects and faced by different characters. Sometimes this absurdity is funny but the dramatist's aim is to get into reality. Another aspect of Pinter's plays is existentialism. His Pinteresque characters show his multi-dimensional way of looking at life.

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...

Journal of emerging technologies and innovative research, 2018

Dr. Mangesh R. Adgokar Assistant Professor Department of English G. S. Tompe Arts, Commerce & Science College, Chandur Bazar. Abstract: Harold Pinter is one of the few dramatists of the second half of the twentieth century who has been the most and foremost influential English playwright since Bernard Shaw on English stage. The work of Harold Pinter remains amongst the most respected and authentic representation of modern man not only in British theatre, but in the theatre of the world even today after his death. His place in British Drama was strongly secured after Martin Esslin’s acknowledgement of him in his celebrated book ‘The Theatre of the Absurd’ in 1960. His plays are an image of the emptiness of human relationship and meaningless effort of man to reconcile with the situation. They better represent the unsatisfying desire of man to find the peaceful haven for secluded life where they find everything at their command. The present paper is an elaborate discussion on Pinter’s ...