A History of English Literature

Harold Pinter

Another actor,Harold Pinter(1930–2008), son of a tailor in the East End of London,
learned from Beckett and the Theatre of the Absurd. His verbal surface has a peeling
realistic veneer, each character being identified by a memorable trick of speech; but
the characters’ relation to what is ordinarily taken as real life is tenuous and oblique.
In The Caretakerthree men pursue their delusions: Aston, who has had electro-
convulsive brain treatment, takes Davies, an evasive tramp, to a ramshackle room in
a derelict house, used both by Aston and his brother Mick, a fantasist. Each manages
his world passably enough, talking it into existence, though references to the real
world become unreal. Davies is not going to ‘get to Sidcup’, any more than Chekhov’s
Three Sisters will go to Moscow; but Sidcup is not so far. Inconsequential cross-talk,
less logical than Beckett’s, with pauses and silences, gives way occasionally, as also in
Beckett, to operatic arias, in Pinter’s case of banality and loneliness. Though found
in O’Casey and Beckett, these verbal rigmaroles became a Pinter trademark.
Audience laughter turns to pity.
Pinter’s other speciality was undefined ominousness. The neurosis of Beckett’s
speakers has a metaphysical dimension, a fear of death, eternity, nothingness.
Pinter’s are scared of being found out or of being beaten up. In The Birthday Party,
the nervous lodger, Stanley, is visited by old friends, who turn out to be from an
organization which they say he has betrayed. As in Franz Kafka’s The Trial,nothing
is clear, everything is menacing. In summary, Pinter’s plays sound formulaic; in
performance, they are gifts to actors, directors and audiences. But his style is easier
to imitate than Beckett’s, and his kind of dialogue, in which the interlocutors speak
past each other, became standard.

DRAMA 385

John Osborne’s Look Back in

Anger. Richard Burton as

Jimmy Porter and Mary Ure as

his wife Alison in Tony

Richardson’s film version of

Look Back in Anger(1958).

Harold Pinter(1930–2008)

Selected plays: The Room,

The Dumb Waiter, The

Birthday Party(1957), The

Caretaker(1959), The

Homecoming(1965), Old

Times(1971), No Man’s Land

(1975), Betrayal(1978), One

for the Road(1984),

Mountain Language(1988).