Victoria Palacios Merino.

Grupo: A

CARYL CHURCHILL vs. HAROLD PINTER.

In this paper I am going to compare “Party time”, written by Harold Pinter, and “Far away”, written for Caryl Churchill and I am going to talk about several contrast points of the time of the plot that develops in both plays.

On the one hand, “In party time”, we can see that the action develops differently than “Far away” because the first play takes place in past tense and “Party time” takes place nowadays.

In the play by Caryl Churchill the action takes place in a short period of time. Also, we can see that in this play there is a three characters play: Todd, Joan and Karper. They don’t meet until the end of the play. The author makes the play more intriguing for me because you don’t know what kind of relationship they have. In this play Churchill talks about a younger girl, Joan, who was horrified since she climbed up a tree and saw some people in a room screaming. She was frightened because she thought she saw blood on the floor. Karper, which is her aunt, tried to help her. Todd is a friend of hers that works with her in a hat shop. He appears in that second scene and is a good friend that helps her to decorate hats. In the last scene, both Karper, Todd and Joan show up again all together.

In “Party Time” you can see how in a night the group of friends have a party, a lot of characters appear in a short period of time in which the play takes place. The author writes parallel histories in the same scenes how I tell before.

The second play is more interesting than the other because the author writes about a recent story which makes it more gripping. For example, one of the stories we can see is that Terry, a man in his forties, still likes Dusty but Liz wants Terry now and Fred wants to go out with Charlotte… This is a complicated story because it has a lot of ways of interpreting it and all these stories occur in just one night, at the party.

I really liked the second play, “Party Time”, because even though it occurs all in one night it seemed very exciting. I am going to conclude that in the future I’d like to read more of the same author to be able to have an objective vision about the topic of the time.