This paper is about Harold Pinter, his plays and his evolution as a playwright.
Harold Pinter was born in Hackney, London, on 10 October 1930. He was educated at Hackney Downs Grammar School and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and Central School of Speech and Drama.
Pinter is widely regarded as one of the two or three most important anglophone playwrights of the second half of the 20th century. He is credited with the invention of a new dramatic style known as the comedy of menace, and his name has been adopted as descriptive of a type of theatre under the blanket term “Pinteresque”. It is a kind of psychological drama in which supposedly secure space is contested by characters who may or may not be the embodiment of each other’s fears, insecurities or latent sexuality.
Only a minority of his own plays – almost all dating from the early part of his career – can be said to conform to the characteristics of the Pinteresque.
“The Dumb Waiter” was written in 1957. It belongs to the first part of his life as a writer. In this play we see two characters. These characters are two killers who are waiting in a room, with a dumb waiter, to know who they have to kill. Until the end of the play we are not sure what their job is, we don’t know that they are killers. This play belongs to the Absurd theatre, like the most of Pinter’s plays. I find a lot of resemblances with the Beckett’s play “Waiting for Godot”, in my opinion this play is inspired in Beckett’s play: two characters from low social class who are waiting and they talk to fill the time. The dialogue also has things in common: a lot of silences, broken sentences, silly questions and silly discussion, for example when they are talking about the Villa and the Spurs or the discussion about how you said, to light the kettle or to put on the kettle.
Ben: Go and light it
Gus: Light what?
Ben: The kettle
.....
Gus: How can you light a kettle?
....
Gus: They say put on the kettle
Ben: Who says?
This kind of dialogues make the play funny, but there are also elements of mistery, like for instance, they speak about their boss, but he doesn’t appear, or the end when Ben talk on the telephone. It is also very mysterious the fact that somebody slides an envelope under the door.
“The Collection” was written in 1961. This play talks about the assumed unfaithfulness that a woman has comitted. She tells it to her husband and he goes to see the lover and it appears a bizarre relationship between them both, that even it becomes friendship. This is completly absurd. In this play, Pinter try to show the peoples relation, like love, jealousy, unfaithfulness, etc...This play has a strange end too. We don’t know if at the end, Stella said the truth and if she really had been unfaithful.
“The Party Time” is one of the most recent plays. It was written in 1991. It talks about a group of people who are meeting in a party. They are speaking about the new club. There is a character who only appears at the end but is named along the play. It makes us wonder who is Jimmy. I don’t know what meaning this character has in the play, because at the end he appears and makes a little strange monologue.
The last play I’ve read about this author is “Ashes to ashes”(1996). This play moves outwards from a man's interrogation of a woman about her lover to admit the Holocaust. In my opinion it is the most difficult one to understand.
Pinter’s plays are short, they are written in just one act. They are not easy to understand for the audience. Just with the text it is very complex to know everything. So the characters’ actions are very important. His plays could seem bored because in his plays nothing happens, we can see just people talking, they are very lineal plays. It’s difficult to know the meaning of each thing, each character, the dialogues, because in Pinter’s plays nothing is what it seems to be. His plays, for the most part, are pieces of social evidence, which he leaves us to interpret or resolve.
In general, Pinter’s plays have many points in common. We have to realized that in the most of plays there are few characters. The characters’ past is very important in the play, for instance Rebecca, in “Ashes to ashes”, is tellling her husband about her past. Pinter said: “The road of our existence is tormented by a memory”.
Pinter wants to highlight the difficulty of communicating amog people, as we can see in “The dumb waiter”, in the dialogues between Gus and Ben or in “Ashes to ashes” between Rebecca and Devlin. Characters in Pinter’s work are very important. As Pinter said, his plays talks about “characters in the extreme edge of their existence, when they are alone and they come back to their rooms and they see themselves faced up to the elemental problem of being”.
The light is other point in common in his plays. The light in his plays is always a faint light.
In all of his plays, there is just one setting. The space is always the same: An interior room.
In the evolution, we can observe three parts in the Pinter’s life as playwright. In the first part, wich “the dumb waiter” belongs, he try to represent the society of the moment, the social classes, and show his political ideas. He is influenced by the circustancies that he lived (The war, the Holocaust, the postwar). With “The dumb waiter” we start to see the characteristics of absurd’s theatre. Long silences and pauses, and absurd situations. “The Collection” belongs to the second part. Here, the characteristics of the absurd’s are more strenght. It’s absurd to think that Bill and James become friends when it suposed that Bill is the lover of his wife. In this age, Pinter give up social themes and try to experiment with the relations among the characters. Now, the characters don’t belong to the low class, they belong to the high class. The third part of his work is a return to his beginning. His plays talks about his political preocuppations and social conditions as we see in “Party time”: a group of people from media class are speaking about the new club, indiferents with the vilence and the war. It’s a criticism. Like in “Ashes to Ashes” a very difficult play to understand which a woman remind the Holocaust.
In short, Pinter’s is a writer who has known to keep faithful to his ideas. He has keep the theme in his plays. We could see that he hardly has evolutioned, the only thing that he have changed a few is the abstraction and absurdity which has increased in the plays and that every play is a little bit more difficult to understand. But, in general, Harold Pinter is the same in the fifties and now.
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