HAROLD PINTER’S EVOLUTION

British dramaturge born in London. In 1948 he studied few time in the Royal Academic of Dramatic Art of London. His love to the theatre started when his was young and also his rebelliousness in front of all he thinks that he disagree. He works as an actor in various companies travelling around the British islands. His first short theatre play was, “The Room” the first appearance was in 1957. The main plays are “The Birthday Party” (1958), “The dwarfs” (1960), “The Lover”(1962), “The Homecoming” (1964), “Old times” (1970), “No Man’s Land” (1974), “Betrayal” (1978). Also he wrote other short plays to the television and to the radio. His originally plays have been described as menace comedy. In a typical play we can find that the characters try to communicate to react to an invasion of their private lives, but always they fail. Their dialogue reflect the difficulties of the communication and they explore different levels of signification that produced the pause and the silence. Pinter also led in London (1967) and New York (1968) these plays The Man in the Glass Booth and Butley (1971).

His poems and prose: 1949-1977 they were been published in 1978. He is married with the writer Antonia Fraser. The most characteristic of his first plays were the force and “the threat of something that ambush”. In fact it says that Pinter is the inventor of the theatre’s gender called “the comedy of menace”, it is a style that the population called “Pintesque”. This could be influenced by the situation of London after the war, because it predominated the anti-Semite violence. Remember that in one of his plays, “The Dumb Waiter”(1957), the two protagonist murderer are waiting to their victim, waiting at the leader’s order, Wilson. This figure, that don’t appear physically at the play, could be interpreted as the anti-Semite English society, that thought that they had rights to say to the Jew what they had to do because they were considered as an inferior class. Therefor we have Gus and Ben like the representation of the Jew community, that had to comply what the anti Jew say to they. One sample of this is at the end of the play when unexpectedly, we discover that the victim was Gus, that had started to think by himself, that was a danger to the people that were no partisan of the Jew community.

More time later , in 1978 it appearance “Betrayal”, a play more trite than the others, because it’s about the fraud that the three main characters had. Also the scenery is different because the typical “room that represent the world” usual in the plays of Pinter is substituted by a succession of scenarios quite different and estrange in time. This is also an autobiographic play, inspirited in a relation a part of his marriage that he had. But if we observed more carefully we find that it’s about the search of the signification of the ones life, and not is the treachery to somebody rather the treachery to oneself. So, what does Jerry and Emma look for?. They had it all: professional success, family,… They are themselves who find the unstabilised the situation, because at the end they are not happy with their lives, and this is what impulse to they to cheat their respective couple. At the beginning of the play, that really is the end of the play, Emma and Robert are aware of continued living an hypocrite dream, and they leave it. They live the dream with so intensity that Robert didn’t get angry with Jerry when he became aware of the romance that his wife had been with him. This in my opinion, it’s due to that Robert is in all moments aware of that his life is a lie where he want to elude lieing Emma, and that’s why he don’t feel rancour to his best friend. Due to this reasons this play is a reflection of the signification of the live to oneself. I don think that there were a conclusion or finality that the reflection of oneself.

This finals without conclusion are typical of Pinter ( the same happens in “The Dumb Waiter”, in where we never know of Ben shoot Gus or not). This could be say more directly with Pinter’s words:

“Meaning begins in the words, in the action, continues in your head and ends nowhere. There is no end to meaning. Meaning which is resolved, parcelled, labelled and ready for export is dead, impertinent, and meaningless.” (1)

The thing that we had say before are also applicable to the play “Ashes to Ashes”·(1996). In this text really disconcerting, one woman (Rebecca) and one man (Devlin) are taking a conversation in the dining room. The relation between both characters is not clear, because at first it seems that Devlin is the husband of Rebecca, most of the time of the play he act as her psychiatrist, trying to help her with her past secrets, that herself negates (“Rebecca: I have never suffered”). At the end of the play we can imagine that Rebecca had a baby, that had been flushed when he get out of a train, for the some collaborator of the anti-Semitism. Rebecca, after this trauma, decided to block all her bad regards, due to her conversation is with errors and extravagant. He intensify this theory with a text: “…when you spill an ounce of gravy, for example, it immediately expands and becomes a vast sea of gravy. It becomes a sea of gravy which surrounds you on all sides and you suffocate in a voluminous sea of gravy. It’s terrible. But it’s all your own fault. […] You are not the victim of it, you are the cause of it. Because it was you who spilt the gravy in the first place […]”.(2)

So she is traumatised with the situation that she lived, and she feel guilty to feel so bad. This is only the part where she is aware of the pain that she has had, the rest of the things that she is telling is distorted. Like the “guides” that conduct the people inside the sea, or the lover the catch her by the neck (that casually also works as a guide tourist). All this situations could be understands as Jew’s massacres in some concentration field in where she could be was.

Common characteristics:

Talking about the common characteristics in his plays, and as we had commented before, Pinter include new concepts, they are necessary because there are a limitation in time and also a necessity of a emotional shock in the public. This terms are called “Pintesque” (that indicate a menacing situation, and we talk about “Comedy of menace”. Harold Pinter, using spaces and characters that appearance be simple and also innocents, do that the play has an absurd atmosphere, of mystery, terror. This tension is achieved with the) “Pinter Pause” (that achieve with big silences; and also with the kind of conversation: trivial, abrupt and also uncertain).

Other of his characteristic are that even be social, is not moralist, leave to the public or readers to reflection and to decode by themselves the message, that the play is interpreting, this is one thing that only do he. By the thematic, Pinter represent to the men like weaker persons, that need to some one to guide their ( in “The Dumb Waiter” for example, they wait to somebody to tell they who had to kill). For this same weakness, it explains anxieties of power and dominion, and the necessity of the person to dream, to create illusions.

So the Harold Pinter plays continued be actual in this days, due to the men hadn’t be evolution in this aspect. As the same as his British contemporaries like Beckett, Osborne and Wesker, they centred in the theme of the limitation of the communication, fact that bring an impulse to the theatre in that time. However, at Pinter’s plays, the isolation is no total, as Beckett, and always there is something that connect the characters with the exterior.

More influences:

Also, there are more things that form Harold Pinter as the author as he is, and overcoat they influenced him: Chronologically, the thematic of these play is not according with the present time when there was written. More over Pinter, as he confess to a paper, his inspiration “comes to read the biography of Hitler’s architect , Albert Speers. That were a man very civilised (as Devlin) who associated some acts of extreme cruelty”(3) Work as an actor served to be up to date about the detail of the position at the scenery, the language he inherit from the poetry that he had written at the school, and the thematic comes from the things that tit had happened in his live. In the Second World War, Pinter had to leave London, and he returned after 14 years: “The condition of being bombed has never left me”(4) (Pinter). With the fall of the Chilean president Allende in 1973, Pinter becomes interested in the rights of the humanity; and when he travelled to Turkey, was conscious of the victims of the politic oppression and the suppression of the own language, so he accentuate more the politic character of his plays and also their inspirited one of them: “ Mountain Language”.

Influenced Actors:

Some of the authors that influence Pinter, are for example Kafka ( in the “irrationality” of the scripture) and Hemingway, these work had been read from he was at school: Beckett and Shakespeare too because he worked at the “Wolfit’s Shakespearean repertory Comp”.

He had been compared with lots of authors, without be himself, one of the British dramaturgy most important after the Second World War: “ Sometimes he is as much fun as Coward, sometimes he is as suspenseful as Hitchcock, sometimes he gives as fierce and intimate an expose of the power-struggle between two people as Strindberg, and sometimes he drops opaque utterances into the air with the peculiar eloquence of T. S. Eliot” (Alastair Macaulay, The Financial Times.)(5)

Conclusion:

Analysing his plays, finally we can arrive to the conclusion that Harold Pinter write autobiographic plays and although basically the scene scheme don’t change in the time (one room supposed “safe”), and the dialogues are quite likeness (intelligence and plenty of pauses that say as if somebody say something), the first plays of Pinter are basically to the social protest, meanwhile the later times is going to be more reflexive. We had “The Dumb Waiter”, that refers to the anti-Semite dominion; later “Betrayal”, in where they concentrated in himself and he ask what one want for his live; and finally in “Ashes to Ashes”, that represents the pent-up horror that one woman in front of the nazi’s holocaust.

Actually Harold Pinter, at the age of 75 is been active, and he likes to be actualised about what happens in the world, and to express what he thinks one example is his discourse of the his Nobel prize received this year, where he talked about the American politic.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

http://timewitnesses.org/english/~pamela2.html

http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4985

http://www.gbrevoort.com/Betrayal.htm

http://encore.dailyheraldtribune.com/Z01_subtext2409.html

http://www.curtainup.com/ashes.html

http://www.counterpunch.org/pinter1204.html

http://www.haroldpinter.org/politics/god_bless_america.shtml

CUOTATIONS:

(1) There are some words said by the writer Harold Pinter, that could be used to understand the play Ashes to Ashes.

(2) It’s a fragment said by Rebecca of the play “Ashes to Ashes”.

(3) Confession of Pinter

(4) Words said by Pinter about the influence of the war in his life.

(5) Paragraph of Alastair Macaulay writer of The Financial Times.