Subject: TEATRO INGLÉS
Code: 14227 group: B
NPA: CL46706 Mª JOSEFA GÓMEZ GARCÍA
PAPER II
EVOLUTION IN HAROLD PINTER’S WORK
I will look into three of his plays to see how Harold Pinter has evolved. The plays are “The dumb waiter” from 1957, “betrayal” from1978 and “Ashes to ashes” from 1996. The aspect that I am going to talk about is how he uses the absurd in some of his plays and not so much in others.
The first of the plays that I will look at is the one he wrote first wrote from the three chosen, that is “The dumb waiter”. Here he presents an absurd situation where two professional killers discover that there is a dumb waiter in their bedroom that keeps sending them kitchen orders which, of course, they can not accomplish because they are not in the kitchen of any restaurant, in fact they do not even have gas in the cooker. This is an absurd situation because if there was a restaurant upstairs that lead to an old kitchen downstairs that is not longer in use, the waiters would know that there was not any longer a kitchen downstairs. Mostly because they would never get anything from that kitchen and therefore they could not supply the customers any food or drink. Apart from the situation the dialogues are also absurd like the one that comes after an envelope slides under the door containing matches:
“Ben: Well, don’t lose them. Red too. You don’t even need a box.
Gus probes his ear with a match.
(Slapping his hand). Don’t waste them! Go on, go and light it.
Gus: Eh?
Ben: Go and light it.
Gus: Light what?
Ben: The kettle.
Gus: You mean the gas.
Ben: Who does?
Gus: You do.
Ben: (His eyes narrowing). What do you mean, I mean the gas?
Gus: Well, that’s what you mean, don’t you? The gas
Ben: (powerfully). If I say go and light the kettle I mean go and light the kettle.
Gus: How can you light a kettle?
Ben: It’s a figure of speech! Light the kettle. It’s a figure of speech!
Gus: I’ve never heard it.
Ben: Light the kettle! It’s common usage.
Gus: I think you’ve got it wrong.
Ben: (menacing) What do you mean?
Gus: They say put on the kettle.
Ben: Who says…?”
They keep going on and on with this conversation which takes them nowhere.
Latter on he wrote Betrayal, this play does not use the absurd. It just tells us an affair that lasted seven years between two persons which are married with somebody else. It gives us images of this affair going back in time. The play starts in the present and it finishes nine years earlier. He omits some of the periods, but he gives us a clear idea of when it all started, when they did enjoy the most and when it finished. In this play there is not any absurd situation. It all makes perfect sense.
From this we could say that Pinter evolved from the absurd to a more conventional way of writing a play. However that would be too daring because if we look at the third play “ashes to ashes” he goes back to presenting an absurd reality. At the end of this play we can hear an echo that comes from nowhere which is totally absurd. Since we all have echoes that keep going through our minds which come from the subconscious but which do not come as a physical voice that can be heard by somebody else. In the play Devlin and the audience can hear Rebecca’s echoes. Here is when the echo appears in the play:
“…She speaks. There is an echo. His grip loosens.
Rebecca: They took us to the trains.
Echo: the trains…”
This is a situation that seems absurd enough to me because it can not be real.
Therefore it is difficult to say weather
Pinter has evolved from the absurd to a more traditional way in writing his
plays. He goes from the absurd to a more conventional way and back to the
absurd. I would say he applies one way or another with the same mastery
depending on which aspect he wants us to think about when we go to see his plays
being performed.