Loredana Denis Totolan

X5535073-P
HAROLD PINTER
The aim of the following essay is to prove that the work of the British play writer
Harold Pinter could be framed within the theatrical movement called realistic, because it
meets all the requirements that have become convention by other authors. Moreover it
also tries to delve into the term of absurd and the definition which the dictionary gives
for this word which led to the creation of prejudice among the public, who thought this
represented on stage would be meaningless. It was necessary to seek other sources that
offered a less simplistic definition, and more in line with our hypothesis, that is, to
demonstrate the degree of reality and daily life that offers the theater of the absurd.
Furthermore the essay also is concerned with Pinters characters, comparing them with
those of Beckett, as though the characters appeared on stage until the premieres of these
authors have only been able to represent an external facet of the individual. The idea of
the crisis that the modern character has fallen into is unnatural because it was wished to
characterize it in a painfully realistic way is defended.
Born in 1930, in London, Harold Pinter is one of the play writers that has created more
controversy among critics and theater audiences. This controversy is due to his plays
that, from the beginning, have broken the rules established by the classical and the
naturalistic theater. He was considered an innovative author throughout his life. This
title may also be equated to one of his predecessor, Samuel Beckett, who also
revolutionized the theater scene. Although already at the end of the nineteenth century
the critic Ferdinand Brunetire predicted the need for demise of strict rules and

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conventions to which the dramatic genre was based1. But until the publication of
Becketts Waiting for Godot, in 1953, Brunetires idea was not applied to English
theater.
Thus, almost sixty years after, Beckett and Pinter will begin the difficult task of
innovating, not only in the use of the units but also in how to deal with everyday issues
and drawing a reality which complicates the lives of human beings as being based on
absurd clichs and contradictions posed by the society to the individual who must deal
with them every day. This is also the opinion of Peter Hall in Directing the lays of
Harold Pinter when he talks about the difficulty of directing the authors plays:
His director must celebrate the ambiguity by charting and then hiding the strong
emotions. He must trust the audience to understand, even when they are dealing
with contradictions. And above all, he must take his actors as precise as the singers
of Mozart.. Yet the precision must paradoxically also be a means of expressing
their own particularity. `The opposite is also true, said Marx (Groucho not Karl).
And this true of directing Pinter. It is not easy; but it is not easy to direct any great
dramatist who deals with the contradictions of living. 2

Many of the critics chose to frame the plays of Pinter in the current theater of the absurd
and comparing him to Beckett. Whereupon prejudices among the public are created,
which looked at them like something dark and hard to understand when, in fact, they

1 "The law of drama": "[...]I leave the dramatist complete freedom in

development. That is where I depart from the old school of criticism that
believed in the mysterious power of the `Rules in their inspiring virtues;
and consequently we see the critics of the old school struggling and striving,
exercising all their ingenuity to invent additional rules [...]. But the truth is
that there are no rules in that sense; there will never be. There are only
conventions which are necessarily variable, since their only object is to fulfil
the essential aim of the dramatic work, and the means of accomplishing this
vary with the piece, the time and the man. " Brandt, G.W., (ed.), Modern
Theories of Drama. A Selection of Writings on Drama and Theatre, 18401990, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998, p.20.
2 Hall, P., Directing the plays of Harold Pinter. Raby, P., The Cambridge Companion
to Harold Pinter,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 154.

were faced with their own daily lives. In this also resembles his predecessor, as
Becketts plays were regarded as sleazy and lacking action. Maybe all this controversy
is because the term Absurd, used by critics and applied to theater, has led to confusion
from the beginning, because instead of clarifying that this is a stream that describes
everything that is absurd in our daily lives, it has made people believe that is a
ridiculous and pointless work which no one will be able to understand.

Later, in 1968, critics as well-known as John Russell Brown began to say that Pinter and
the new play writers have been attributed too many adjectives, which only served to
keep the fashion critics, besides of creating prejudice as it had been said a few lines
above:
"The new plays have been given all sorts of labels `kitchen -sink drama was one of
the first; neo-realist; drama of non-communication; absurd drama; comedy of
menace; dark comedy, drama of cruelty. But no cap has fitted more than a year or
two, none has been big enough for more than two heads; and often the caps seem
more suitable for the journalists who invent them than for the dramatist on whom
they are thrust. Perhaps the first thing to say about the new dramatists is that they
keep the critics on the run".3

However, other important critics as Louis Gordon, in 1970, tried to continue with the
tradition of the labels and said that Pinter was an uprooted naturalist:
"What is of crucial importance is that Pinter is neither an existentialist nor an
absurdist, for he never portrays the existential dilemma wherein the man seeks an
order in an order less universe. Pinter is simply, if a label is necessary, a ruthless
realist. His characters face so much disorder in the universe as disorder in
themselves. They try constantly to structure their lives, but unaware that their
actions and behavior revolve around deeper sources than conscious ones, they are
constantly confronted by chaos. But again, this is a disorder of the self, not the
universe."4

3 Brown, J. R., Modern British Dramatists, Prentice Hall, Inc., Englewood

Cliffs, New Jersey, 1968, p. 2.
4 Gordon, L., Stratagems to Uncover Nakedness (The Dramas of H. Pinter),
University of Missouri Press,Columbia, 1970, p. 10-11.

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Therefore Pinter may fit into the traditional realism current while he can also be
considered an author of the tradition of the absurd. However, if we include him in both a
current or the other one, he will always be different from the other authors belonging to
it, precisely because he mingles traits of each other in his works.
"For Pinter there is no contradiction between the desire for realism and the basic
absurdity of the situations that inspire him. Like Ionesco he regards life in its
absurdity as basically funny- up to a point".5

Now, after having studied and analyzed the works of Pinter and his speeches devoted to
playwriting, we conclude they are all about our everyday life, always from the point of
view of the individual. Pinter tries to stage more personal situations such as in The
Room or The Birthday Party, in which there are some threatening characters trying to
snatch the home and peace of mind of the protagonists, who are afraid to lose their
identity, their social environment and their properties. This was a common sentiment
among the British society during the World War II.

Pinter draws the characters in an impartial way that only he can. We can meet on stage
those people we see every day and who live events which are not always attractive or
end happily, or sometimes maybe do not even have an end; people who cannot always
make fluid sentences because they lose their memories sometimes; people who make
the audience laugh in the most unexpected way, for example by highlighting the absurd
aspect of the language that is full of set phrases losing sense, or being in situations
presented by their social status that had never previously lived in scene.
Pinter also gives prominence to the marginal figures, and therefore it flips one of the
conventional principles.
5 Esslin, M., The Theatre of the Absurd, London, Pelican Books, 3ed.: 1980,
p. 242.

"A character on stage who can present no convincing argument or information as to

his past experience, his present behavior or his aspirations, nor give a
comprehensive analysis of his motives is as legitimate and as worthy of attention as
one, who alarmingly, can do all these things. The more acute the experience the
less articulate its expression."6

According to Pinter, the more a character insists on accurately telling a past experience
the harder it is to express, as happened to Ellen in Silence or to Stan in The Birthday
Party. On the other hand, if a character has to represent a vice or a virtue it ceases to be
free and real and it becomes and archetype similar to the earlier theatrical trends. As we
enter the dramatic type, we observe the same difficulty to represent a reality near the
viewer, only this time it will be due to the lack of biographical and psychological
features explicit in the text. Regarding biographical data, Pinter provides us with the age
and the sex of the characters, but we cannot count on an (at least) reliable history on the
origin of the characters: "Mick: You got two names. What about the rest? Eh? Now
come on, why did you tell me all this dirt about you being an interior decorator?7 And
in regard to psychological traits, we must discover them by ourselves: "Between my
lack of biographical data about them and the ambiguity of what they say lies a territory
which is not only worthy of exploration but which it is compulsory to explore."8 Only in
the case of Aston in The Caretaker, Pinter discloses the psychological background of
this character who was interned in a kind of psychiatric hospital. Thus we see that the
types, classifications and other conventional approaches, whose goal is to assign labels
to dramas in all their aspects and between them the character is not exempt, they suffer
a crisis when authors like Pinter appear.

6 Pinter, H., Writing for the theatre, cit., p. ix.

7 Pinter, The Caretaker, Plays Two, F&F, Londres, 1991, p. 71.
8 Pinter, H., Writing for the theatre, cit., p.xii.
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In order to demonstrate that the situations and the characters do not go far from the
everyday, the summary of the arguments of a Beckett and Pinter play are presented:
1- Waiting for Godot: two people outside waiting for a third. Meanwhile they try to
solve their existential doubts but when they see that it is impossible they
entertain themselves by playing.
2- The Birthday Party: a young man who has escaped from an organization and
found refuge in another place, but he is found and taken in captivity again.
In the first one, although represented by Vladimir and Stragon, everyone has
experienced how waiting can become tedious, and while we wait, a thousand existential
questions come to our minds and we combine them with the simplest activities. In the
second one, although we have not been victims of brainwashing by any organization as
seems to have happened to Stan, we have found ourselves helpless when to say no to
something or someone because they have managed to convince us through talking.
Therefore despite the different readings each can do the possibility of the viewer to
identify with the characters is undeniable.
One of the problems that the spectators have with the Theatre of the Absurd is that they
are not always willing to be represented in all of their facets, especially those who could
become mere copies of our daily lives. For example, no one knows if we will become
human waste like Nagg and Nell (Becketts Endgame) who are old and useless and that
is the reason why their sons have put them into cans, or we may even become irrelevant
because we let ourselves be dominated by what other tell us, as it happens to Stan in
The Birthday Party.
Moreover we also find out why some viewers struggle to identify with the characters of
the authors of the absurd and Pinter, and that is that each of us has our own way to see
ourselves, which is often not true, and when we witness the reality on stage we tend to

ignore it with the excuse that we do not understand. Furthermore, since the problems
addressed by the absurdity of the characters are of specific individuals, they will not
always conclude with ours but we believe that they match those of any person around
us. When we talk about person we mean the individual that is not representative of
any ideology or social group; because only then the theater can venture into the depths
of our condition, showing the individual in his intimacy, face to face with himself.

As we have seen Beckett and Pinters plays can represent people in a realistic way, but
if we take a step further and we will intersperse two works written by the same authors
with their plots and characters to show that if they represent humanity as it is, they
could also become part of one another. The plays that are going to be used as an
example are Waiting for Godot and A Slight Ache, since they share a character who says
nothing, like is the case of the latter, or even does not appear, as in the former but yet,
that invisible or mute character is the main reason for the conflict in the drama of two
other characters. The common character is represented by Pinters matches seller who is
waiting in the same way that Vladimir and Estragon are waiting outdoors. Besides, the
disheveled appearance of the seller reminds us of these two. Flora and Edward could be
Godot for the seller because if Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for Godot to change
something in their lives, the sellers life will change as a result of entering in the
couples house. Although we could also change the roles as follows: the seller could be
both Vladimir and Estragon who are tired of talking and finding no answer they have
remained silent. Or, another example, the seller could be the Godot of Flora and
Edward, becoming the character who brings them out of their routine.

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Waiting for Godot has also been compared to The Caretaker due to its lack of plot and
action. The fluidity of the characters is explained by Ronald Knowles as follows:
"Language, character, and being are here aspects of each other made manifest in speech
and silence. Character is no longer the clearly perceived entity underlying clarity of
articulation the objectification of a social and moral entelechy but something amorphous
and contingent9
However, the individual that we recognize in Pinters characters is in a continuous
struggle against everyday habits. Then, there will be characters that seem psychopaths
or maniacs, for example Bert and his violent attitude towards Ridely at the end of The
Room , the family members in The Homecoming who also do not show a stable moral
attitude and socially accepted, Albert in A Night Out who is violent with a prostitute, or
Nicholas in One for the Road who is a pervert oppressor in his attitude towards the
family of Victor. Due to this struggle the character show themselves as aberrant, as in
the named occasions, when all they are looking for is something to be dominant in. As
Penelope Prentice says in her book The Pinter Ethic, where throughout the text, the
author analyzes the cases of Pinters characters when they do not act ethically according
to social conventions and yet those are features of most people in our daily lives.
"[...] `all that power of a torturer, and the quest for respect and love which when
coupled with insecurity and lack of self-knowledge, leads to a struggle for
dominance while robbing the self of the knowledge that such struggle can only self
-destruct. Pinter does not dramatize the ravings of the aberrant psychopath, but the
actions of fairly ordinary human beings embodying attitudes and actions most
human share."10

9 "The Caretaker." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 16 June 2014. Web. 18

June 2014.
10 Prentice, P., The Pinter Ethic, New York and London, Garland, 1994, p.
368-369.

We cannot but ask ourselves, what do the characters mentioned above want to
dominate? Because Pinter gives the viewers complete freedom to make their own
conclusions:
"A categorical statement, I find, will never stay where it is and be finite. It will
immediately be subject to modification by the other twenty-three possibilities of it.
No statement I make, therefore, should be interpreted as final and definitive. One
or two may sound final and definitive, but I wont regard them as such tomorrow,
and I wouldnt like you to do so today."11

The following answers are suggested:

1- Bert wanted to dominate at home in The Room, as the husband who had always
been for Rose, with their daily routines: he went to work, having his food
prepared by her who was also happy with her lifestyle in the room. So Bert
could not let a stranger disturb their peace.
2- Max, in The Homecoming, is the most remarkable in the thirst for dominance:
"Dont you talk to me like that. Im warning you." He says this to Lenny in the
first act. And at the end of the play he says: "She wont... be adaptable!" He just
wants to have a woman at home to replace the feminine figure of his dead wife.
3- Albert, in A Night Out, shows his violent side, which he carried in secret,
because of being subjected to his mother and not being able to dominate at
home.
4- Nicholas, in One for the Road, begins to show his dominant position with the
following words at the beginning of the play: "Hello! Good morning. How are
you? Lets not beat about the bush. Anything but that. Daccord? Youre a
civilised man, So am I. Sit down." He also emphasizes the idea of a civilized
man just to realize later that he is not civilized at all because he is oppressing
families due to political issues: "[...] I believe - the man who runs this country
11 Pinter, "Writing for the theatre", op. cit., p.vii
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announced to the country: We are all patriots, we are as one, we all share a
common heritage. Except you, apparently."
Thus, through asking questions about the characters of Pinter and taking advantage of
the freedom that the author gives us to interpret the meaning of his works and creatures,
we were able to confirm two of our hypotheses. The first one about the daily lives of the
characters and the second about the descendants of the Pinters characters from previous
authors like Beckett.
In conclusion, the name of theater of the absurd has only led to create a series of
prejudices, which have been fueled by criticism from the moment that certain works of
Beckett were plotted. Such prejudices were later moved to the works of Pinter, because
Pinters plays had also these unconventional and realistic elements. After trying to
frame Pinter in one of the movements that were in vogue when he began producing in
the sixties, we have come to the same conclusion as some of the critics who have cited,
that is, conventions that have fossilized the minds of the viewers, not realizing that what
is now conventional no longer is in the future.
Another conclusion that has been reached is that Pinters characters may appear
abstract, due to failure in obtaining a clear data of the characters mind, just like
Beckett. But the public's identification with these characters is possible depending upon
the concept of man that we have, because we have to interpret the character
individually.
Finally, another conclusion is that the minds of the viewers have open when receiving
the works of these authors.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot: Tragicomedy in 2 Acts. New York: Grove,
1954. Print.

Brandt, G.W., (ed.), Modern Theories of Drama. A Selection of Writings on

Drama and Theatre, 1840-1990, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998, p.20.

Brown, J. R., Modern British Dramatists, Prentice Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs,
New Jersey, 1968, p. 2.

D. Peacock, Keith. Harold Pinter and the New British Theater. London:
Greenwood, 1997. Print.

Esslin, M., The Theatre of the Absurd, London, Pelican Books, 3ed.: 1980, p.
242.

Gordon, L., Stratagems to Uncover Nakedness (The Dramas of H. Pinter),

University of Missouri Press, Columbia, 1970, p. 10-11.

Hall, P., Directing the plays of Harold Pinter. Raby, P., The Cambridge
Companion to Harold Pinter, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p.
154.

Hinchliffe, Arnold P. Harold Pinter. New York: Twayne, 1967. Print.

Jane Wong Yeang Chui.Remembrance of Things Past and Present:
Chronological Time and Cognitive Sensibilities in Harold Pinter's Silence and
The Proust Screenplay. The Modern Language Review Vol. 107, No. 4 (October

2012) (pp. 1033-1046)

Pinter, Harold. The Caretaker. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1963. Print.
Pinter, Harold. Plays Harold Pinter. London: Eyre Methuen, 1976. Print.
Prentice, P., The Pinter Ethic, New York and London, Garland, 1994, p. 368-369.
"The Caretaker." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 16 June 2014. Web. 18
June 2014.

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