MÓNICA PANADERO SAYAS

Teatro Inglés Siglos XIX y XX

Grupo B

PAPER  2

HAROLD PINTER’S DEVELOPMENT

Harold Pinter (1930 - ), British dramatist, whose work comes near to the theatre of the

absurd. He was born in London, and in 1948 he studied during a short time in the Royal

Academic of Dramatic Art of London.  In the 10 following years he was an actor in

several companies of repertoire on tour the British islands.

His plays, enigmatic and original, have been described as "threat comedies".  In

a typical play, the characters try to communicate to react in front  an invasion in

their lives.  His dialogue reflects the difficulties of communication and explores the

different levels of meaning that the pauses and silence produce.  Other of the

characteristics of his plays are that is based on jealousy, treason, love... With the

passage of the years he took more care of language, we can see in Ashes to Ashes where

neither Rebeca nor Devlin hide words perhaps for not hide shameful facts.

Harold has been always interested in the policy and later he criticizes it in his

plays as happens in The Dumb Waiter where he criticizes the capitalist slavery, this play

shows us  the relations of  power and to fight it of characters by the power.

Another characteristic of Pinter’s play is the “single room”. The author evolution but he

also keeps a lot of elements of the past, like the single room, or the broken relationships

between the characters so as the dialogue between them.

Many critics have been centred in Pinter's plays and have drawn conclusions like

the following ones, here we can see as Pinter followed a same line to write his plays.

The Dumb Waiter is a dialogue between two men hired to commit a murder. The

humour isn’t verbal. The indifference of Ben and us to the dreadful thing they are going

to do and their puzzled solicitude for the victim of an ordinary street accident is

profound and unsetting. We can see in the Dumb Waiter the single room where the

characters don’t have relation with the outside but needless to say as Mr Pinter goes. (1)

The Collection  might be a farce, but needless to say as Pinter goes about things

it ends up as nothing of the sort; it becomes instead a cool,  precise exposition of the

thesis, recurrent in his drama, that full communication is impossible between human. (2)

Betrayal is an adulterous love affair that breeds ecstasy and pain in its spiral of

desire and deception. Betrayal is an exquisite play, brilliantly simple in form and

courageous in its search for poetry that turn’s banality into a melancholy beauty.

Perhaps with the experience of writing his screenplay with Proust in mind, Pinter

tunnels backwards in time, starting the play with a meeting between his adulterous

lovers, Jerry and Emma. In 9 scenes we move back through the stages of the affair, until

the play ends with its beginning in the house of Emma’s husband Robert, who is Jerry’s

best friend. Betrayal is perhaps Pinter most deceptive play. Behind its smooth pastes

surface is a haunting vision of man as a creature trapped in an orbit of betrayal that send

him circling around the ideal without ever reaching it (3)

Ashes to ashes take us on a mysterious, sinister and hypnotic journey. More and

more emerges, without our ever being able to latch on to something that would count as

a journalistic fact. Unusually, as you watch it, you get the sense of the characters

revealing themselves to us at exactly the same point as the revealed themselves to the

author. (4)

He introduces new elements in his plays as a result of his evolution as a writer,

but he doesn’t consider leaving the ones which appeared in his first works. Predominate

the silence although did not pass so much in his first plays, The Dumb Waiter or The

Collection.  As of 1991 he begins to give less feeling to the dark side of  life, as if he hid

all the tragic of life as example wrote Ashes to Ashes where also we can see as with the

evolution predominate the silence in the dialogue of the characters.

The characteristics of the theatre of the absurd maintain them in all their works

although in his first works were more evident and he always leaves an open end so that

when we arrive at house continue thinking about the play and draw our own

conclusions.

His evolution and his great work have been awarded with numerous prizes

among other The Shakespeare Prize, The European for Prize Literature, The Cohen

British Literature Prize, the Laurence Oliver Award. In 1999 he was made a Companion

of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature and has received honorary degrees from

fourteen universities.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

(1)    The Dumb Waiter- Premiere. The Dumb Waiter. Dec 2005. http ://www.haroldpinter.org/plays/plays_dumbwaiter.shtml< /u>