Introduction: Harold Pinter’s Transmedial Histories

Drama on Drama, 1988

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.

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.

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.

Talking Drama, ed. by Judith Roof, 2009

The traditional narrative of Harold Pinter's early critical reception in England—recycled in both academic and popular discourse, and indeed recounted with glee by the playwright himself— has revolved around the "total disaster" of The Birthday Party, subsequently redeemed by the triumph of The Caretaker. In this essay, I want to look to the reception of Pinter's stage-work in Paris, where an alternative production chronology disrupts, or at least makes visible, this apparently innate narrative of "failure" (of The Birthday Party) and "success" (of The Caretaker). In particular, I will interrogate the role of the French critics in mediating and rationalizing the reception of Pinter's plays, and the ways in which they attempted to relate the works to the socio-cultural and dramatic specificities of post-War (and post-Godot) Paris.

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.

2006

Balıkesir Üniuers!tesl Harold Pinter was gluen the Nobel Prize /or Literature in 2005 for his contributlons to Brltfsh and contemporary drama. Pinter has been a theatrical institution for hal/ a century, he has reuolutionised his theatre by being a conscientious objector in pub/ic and a politlcaf actiuist since the 1980s. He has explored di/ferent genres lncluding prose and poetry, plays for stage, radio and screen. His crossouer from one medium to another, his deliberate decision to write /or more than one medlum, has gluen him the opportunity to reach the potential mass audience. He has shocked bewifdered, disappointed, and astonished audiences and critics. He swiftly became accepted as Britain's premier dramatist. This paper traces the euolution that Plnter has gone through /rom the early 1950s until the 2000s. Additionatly, the paper Identifles Harofd Pinter's 'Pinteresque' style-a term whlch enters English Language and Literature after him and also exemplify and reason Plnter's change in his styfe from poetical to politicaf.

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.

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