INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS IN HAROLD PINTER’S PLAYS
The purpose of this assignment is to study Harold Pinter’s work through the reading of three of his plays, namely, The Dumb Waiter (1960), Party Time (1991), and Ashes to Ashes (1996). Particularly, the aspect analysed is going to be the interpersonal relations, that implies the characters’ affective relations, their positions as for each other and their communicative interaction.
Harold Pinter is one of the most well-known playwrights and he possesses a considerable theatrical production (over 30 plays).
In The Dumb Waiter, one of his first productions, we see how hierarchy is the predominant key by which relations among the characters are ruled. Thus, we find that Gus is submissive to Ben, and he is submissive to Wilson, the boss of both, thus, a chain of dependence is established. However, we can also notice that, even carrying a certain manageability, Gus doesn’t lose some “revolutionary” spirit, whereas Ben is completely subordinated to the absent figure of Wilson, as he obeys all his orders in an automatic way. Referring to the communication, the dialogue Gus and Ben have is built, on the one hand, upon the insistence and anxious personality of Gus and, on the other hand, the refusal and indifference of Ben. Ben works like a wall built by tense silences and strict words against which the constant questions and complaints of Gus bounce. “Harold Pinter has defined speech as a strategy designed to cover the nakedness of silence, and Ben is a prime example”₁. So that in spite of the fact that Gus is interested in treating some kind of profound topic, their conversation is, at any moment, trivial and meaningless.
With regard to the second play under consideration, Party Time, we find a group of bourgeois people of different ages in a party. They are all interacting with each other and basing their dialogues on mere superficial topics such as a “health club” they belong to. They show themselves as being indifferent to any aspect that is not included in their limited “visual field”. As in The Dumb Waiter, there is a character, Jimmy, who is absent during the majority of the time (his only appearance takes place at the end of the play), but he develops an important role throughout the action. One of the characters of the party, a young woman called Dusty, Jimmy’s sister, is always asking about him (so the concept of repetition appears again in Pinter’s play), but she is ignored as Jimmy represents that thing that, as Terry, (her husband), says, is not on anyone’s agenda. Apart from that, in this play, differing from the first one analysed here, we can hear fluent conversations, although they are still banal, but in which the participants are all apparently active and interested. We still bump into the characteristic silences and pauses which, however, will be so much more meaningful in the next play we are going to comment, which is one of the latest productions of Harold Pinter: Ashes to Ashes.
In this one, Rebecca and Devlin, the protagonists, share some kind of relation of complicity. Devlin’s function is to be the listening ear and the mouth that interrogates Rebecca about her past. In Ashes to Ashes, the notion of repetition reaches the highest level. Devlin has to ask her the same question again and again if he wants to receive an answer, as Rebecca seems to be in another sphere, she doesn’t pay much attention to Devlin’s excessive questions. The course of the dialogue doesn’t follow a specific topic, there are deeply philosophical reflections and very meaningful silences inserted between other talking points. Furthermore, it is not only that the characters don’t keep a homogeneous conversation, but that the deep silences, above all by her, mark traumatic jumps between conversational topics.
DEVLIN. When was that? When did you live in Dorset? I’ve never lived in Dorset. [Pause]
REBECCA. Oh by the way somebody told me the other day that[…]₃),
Here, the expression “by the way” makes the previous dialogue be half-concluded, factor that may disorient the audience. “In Ashes to Ashes, Pinter returns to the linguistic disjointedness of the earlier plays, and – perhaps by those means –to a level of ambiguity that makes for a variety of interpretations of the play”₄.
Therefore, in order to conclude, we can assert that there is an omnipresent feature in Harold Pinter’s work, which is the “non-communicative” aspect, interpreted as silences and pauses which are not really as empty as they may seem.
On the other hand, when dealing with such a wide production of plays, it is not strange to notice how the structure of interpersonal relations is not the same in all plays by Pinter (hierarchic, parallel, antagonist relations, etc.). These variations, which can be regarded as a non-lineal evolution, are closely related to the communicative intention, which in the case of Harold Pinter bears an important socio-political content.
₁- Appeared on SparkNotes (study guides by Barnes and Noble); available from the World Wide Web @ http://www.sparknotes.com/drama/dumbwaiter/canalysis.html
₂- The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter, printed version, p. 142
₃- Ashes to Ashes by Harold Pinter, printed version, p. 417
₄- Andrew Wyllie, University of the West of England, "Pinter, Harold" in The Literary Encyclopedia [online database] Profile first published 20/6/2002; available from the World Wide Web @ http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4985
Academic year 2005/2006
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Cristina Vidal Sales
Universitat de València Press