UERJ LITERATURA INGLESA VI PEONIA VIANA GUEDES 2012.

12.2 HAROLD PINTERS THE CARETAKER (1960) CLASS WORK: DISCUSS ANY RELEVANT ASPECT/THEME OF THE CARETAKER USING YOUR OWN IDEAS AND THE CRITICAL MATERIAL PROVIDED BELOW - Some of Harold Pinters plays carry out an attack on the worlds belief systems as belief systems and particularly on their false claim to represent the truth. The Caretaker deals with one overriding characteristic shared by practically every religious and nonreligious creed of recent centuries and yet one which has rarely, if ever, received serious treatment in the theatre or, indeed, in literature. This is altruism: acting in the interests of others, being caring about or taking care of others. This is the hidden agenda behind the plays title. The theme is worked out in different ways according to the play's three characters: Aston, a mentally-fragile recluse living in a junk-filled attic, brings home Davies, an exploitative old tramp, and invites him to stay, which seriously annoys Aston's younger brother Mick, a builder, who owns the house and, in an echo of Aston's philanthropy towards Davies, lets Aston stay there. Considering that Harold Pinter's great stage plays are concerned with the dichotomy between truth and reality and power and illusion, then it is Aston's philanthropy that is central to The Caretaker. This is because Aston is in a similar position to Stanley in The Birthday Party in that he is, or, in his case, has been, committed to truth. Like his dramatic predecessor, however, this commitment was somewhat shaky, a favourite Pinter theme. Having once abandoned his commitment to truth, Aston then searches for a meaningful substitute and plumps for altruism. This explains his philanthropy towards Davies. That this is a serious attempt by Aston to construct a philosophy intended to give meaning to life, as it is in most belief systems, is demonstrated through Pinter's use of imagery in the play, particularly that related to Buddhism and Christianity. The action of The Caretaker, however, reveals that Aston's motives, in common with those of Mick and Davies, are fundamentally self-centred and totally illusory. In Aston's case, his philanthropy towards Davies is in the hope that the down-and-out will bolster his deluded vision of himself as a carpenter or handyman by being his caretaker. With beautiful justice - Pinter at his very best - Mick cynically offers Davies the same position as caretaker. This persuades Davies to transfer his allegiance to him, which, in turn, convinces Aston that his attempt to substitute altruism for truth has failed and to expel Davies. In an echo of Goldberg and Stanley [from The Birthday Party, 1957], however, Mick's triumph also has its tragic side in that his Machiavellian machinations to get Davies out of his house also disillusions him with regard to his own altruism towards his brother, ironically an altruism that echoes Aston's towards Davies in that it is actually based on Mick's need to have his own vision of himself as a man of means bolstered by his elder brother. (KARWOWSKI, Michael. Harold Pinter 1930-2008 - A Tale of Two Lives. Contemporary Review. vol. 291, n. 1693, 2009. p. 226-236)

- Pinter, one of England's most important dramatists, has also written screenplays, revue sketches, poems, and criticism. The limitations of human perception are explored in all of Pinter's plays; but Pinter, the dispassionate observer, does not allow the possibility that investigation of human limitations might render his people less inscrutable, either to themselves or others. Life, for Pinter, is of no consequence; hence, political and social commitments are meaningless. Pinter's characters, safe and mindless in the womb-like rooms that he creates for them, ignore or fear all aspects of the world which always threatens to intrude. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8, rev. ed.) [In The Homecoming, three] men are trying, by means of language, to surmount barriers and find common ground. Their language itself, because of its imperfectionsand their lack of expertisereveals the fears, needs, and inadequacies they struggle to conceal. All three co-operate to cover up things which are embarrassing not merely to one but to all. They attempt to close the abysssilence is the great enemygenerally understanding too much rather than too little. Their talk shows not so much a failure as an evasion of communication. In silence, the questions they avoid are deafening, and silence in this world becomes a catalyst of action, even action itself. Talk seems an expedient, a means of evasion. In silence and in the dark is the nonentity against which they all precariously struggle. The fight against nonentity, or simply non-being, is something that echoes over and over through the Pinter plays. In the case of the tramp of The Caretaker, who has left all his papers at Sidcup, the theme is worked out against the background of the other two men, who have a slightly stronger grip on identity. Aston achieves this by clinging tightly to the very little he has left, and Mick by refusing to let anything come between him and his "I'll-make-this-place-into-apenthouse" delusions of grandeur. (pp. 73-4)Kenneth Tynan, reviewing the play, wrote "one laughs in recognition; but one's laughter is tinged with snobbism." This seems to indicate an enviable certainty of being out of reach. It would be comforting if this picture of humanity had nothing to do with the world we know, but it seems to concern not an isolated group of institutionalized eccentrics, but Man in general. If my laughter was tinged with anything, it was embarrassment, and occasionally horror, a feeling of having been caught out, and exposed to a chill wind. (p. 74) Does no one recognize in himself the hapless turning from attitude to attitude in order to entrench a position, or see, in the desperate claims to knowing what goes on, his own baffled attempts to lay claim to at least a partial understanding of what life is all about? Does no one share the feeling that "if only the weather would break," if only everyone and everything would stand still for a tick of time (in fact if only things were different) then one might have a chance? Does no one see in Aston's sad monologue, his own reduction by the shocks of living; does no one feel appalled at the difficulties of disinterested kindness in a world that lives not by charity but by politics? We have all left our references and papers somewhere. We mostly feel we have "cards of identity" somewhere even more inaccessible than Sidcup. Sidcup seems to derive from the same myth-making impulse as the Garden of Eden, where we mislaid our innocence and our nobility, but if the weather would break, we might dash back and get them. One sees in the play the frenzied attempt to feel important, and to be "in" on things. We must know the right responses whether to jig-saws, fret-saws, "Blacks," work-shy people, the latest "ism" or the newest West End play. We must know what "they" are saying, even if we choose to disagree. "Oh, they're handy," says the tramp, and we recognize the awful futility of it all. The terrible thing about the dialogue is that it has the authentic ring of the stop-gap.

Behind it lies the awareness of another world of meanings, a plane on which defeats are being acknowledged, and where there is a fight for the right to exist, an endless apology for existence, a fierce assertion of rights, and a hideous plea for forgiveness of what is known to be unforgivable, and irremediable. When silence begins to leak through the battered pores of the speakers, they point to the obvious, to the bucket for instance, catching the drips from the roof. They distract each other's attention away to the mundane realities, that are at the same time a symbol of the unsatisfactory state of things which will, of course, be put right in time, when the shed is built in the garden, when we get back from Sidcup with our papers. Or again, when the silence threatens, one may ask "What's your name?" and continue the fight against nonentity. No matter that it's been asked before, and given before; it's still a symbol of stability, especially if we know not only the assumed name, but the real name as well. Yet it tells us nothing. Anonymity remains, and the papers are still at Sidcup. (pp. 75-6) Valerie Monogue, "Taking Care of the Caretaker" (originally published in The Twentieth Century, 168, September, 1960), in Pinter: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Arthur Ganz, Prentice-Hall, 1972, pp. 72-7. - In its own way Harold Pinter's The Caretaker is a perfect little play. Like the work of Samuel Beckett, it is a terrifying comedy. I mention Beckett, not only because Pinter has acknowledged his indebtedness to the Parisianized Irishman, but because The Caretaker is a variation on the theme that has begun to haunt the stage since the younger men of the theatre began waiting for Godot. This does not mean that Pinter is not an original talent: the specific English accent of his play lends it its own stamp. (p. 145) Plays like The Caretaker owe some of their fascination to ambiguity. But this ambiguity covers what is inherently a simpleperhaps too simpledesign. Hence they disturb without actually moving us. The artistic plan is narrower than it pretends to be; the ambiguity is an unconscious spiritual device whereby the author, uncommitted in his soul in relation to the bewilderment and anguish life causes him, remains congealed in his quandarya situation which may after all be easier to bear than an outright decision as to how to resolve or change it. It is a tribute to the talent and value of The Caretaker one of the most representative plays in the contemporary English-language theatre that it can provoke such thoughts, conjectures and perhaps controversies. (p. 147) Harold Clurman, "Harold Pinter" (1961), in his The Divine Pastime: Theatre Essays (reprinted with permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.; copyright 1946, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1967, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1974 by Harold Clurman), Macmillan, 1974, pp. 145-47 - It isn't hard to see why The Caretaker should have been interpreted as morality play in which Davies is Everyman, Aston Christ and Mick the Devil. But it won't do; the characters are far too actual for that, the play has too many incongruities and excrescences, there is too much movement beneath the surface. I think it far more to the point to consider the three men as constituting a triad roughly on the order of the brothers Karamazovthe major faculties of man's being, appearing as a triple irruption from the depths of the dramatist's imagination. And like Dostoevsky's brothers the characters of Pinter's drama are not therefore symbols but mysterious new creations; their reality is self-contained, so that they do not so much indicate meaning as irradiate it. What then is wrong, or rather, less than magnificently right about The Caretaker? The final image is achieved: of unbearable loneliness, of war in the members of the body, and yet also of a persistent blind movement toward communion and authentic life.

(pp. 98-9) And yet there is a weakness somewhere, an ultimate failure of establishment, a final deprivation of fullness, of the sense of inevitability and of the vision of reality freshly apprehended. It seems to me that all this is due not to Pinter's untraditional dramaturgy but to the fact that he is not untraditional enough. That is to say, his play is too much a thing of jarring styles, characterizations and motivations, not a consistent piece of relentlessly exhibited discovery, such as we find true in the work of Beckett and in most of Ionesco. (p. 99) Richard Gilman, "Straightforward Mystification" (1961), in his Common and Uncommon Masks: Writings on Theatre 19611970 (copyright 1971 by Richard Gilman; reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.), Random House, 1971, pp. 97-100. - Within each Pinter room, the props seem to be realistically functional, and only in retrospect do they acquire symbolic significance. Consider, for example, Pinter's treatment of such crucial details as food and clothing, in comparison with the casual realism of Osborne, or the frank symbolism of Beckett. The various preparations for tea in Look Back in Anger seem to be parallelled by the prosaic cocoa, tea, bread, sandwiches, crackers of Pinter's plays; in sharp contrast is the farcical and stylized carrot-turnip-radish "business" of Godot. So too, three men grabbing for an old man's bag in The Caretaker has few of the symbolic overtones of the slapstick juggling of derbies in Godot. It is, however, in their respective use of that innocuous prop, a pair of shoes, that the different symbolic ctechniques of Beckett and Pinter are in most graphic evidence. Early in Godot, Vladimir establishes shoes as a metaphysical symbol: "There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet." At the end of Godot, it is by virtue of being barefoot that Estragon admits he has always compared himself to Christ. In Pinter's Caretaker, the old man keeps trying on different shoes that might enable him to get on the road to Sidcup, where he claims to have left his identity papers. Each pair of shoes is rejected for specific misfit"a bit small," "too pointed," "no laces"before the curtain-lines of the play: "they're all right if I was to get my papers would you would you let would you if I got down and got my." The finality of the fragments indicates that no shoes can ever fit, that the journey to Sidcup cannot be made. Thus, the symbolic significance of the shoes is instantaneous with Beckett, cumulative with Pinter. Most crucial to an understanding of Pinter's theatre is the symbolism of his characters. For all their initially realistic appearance, their cumulative impact embraces the whole of humanity. In so generalizing, Pinter extends the meaning of his characters beyond such particulars as Osborne treats; nevertheless, he does not achieve the metaphysical scope upon which Beckett insists, from his opening lines: "Nothing to be done." Pinter's defenseless victims are a middle-aged wife, a man who asks too many questions, an ex-pianist, a broken old man. Ruthlessly robbed of any distinction, they come to portray the human condition. And Pinter's villains, initially as unpreprossessing as the victims, gradually reveal their insidious significance through some of the most skillful dialogue on the English stage today [1962]. For it is language that betrays the villainsmore pat, more clich-ridden, with more brute power than that of their victims. Even hostile critics have commented on the brilliance of Pinter's dialogue, and it is in the lines of his villains that he achieves precise dramatic timing and economical manipulation of commonplaces. Representatives of the System, Pinter's villains give direct expression to its dogma. In the plays of Osborne and Beckett, which also implicitly attack the System, the oppressive forces are presented through the words of their victims. (pp. 79-81) Pinter's drama savagely indicts a System which sports maudlin physical comforts, vulgar brand names, and vicious vestiges of a religious tradition. Pinter's villains descend from

motorized vans to close in on their victims in stuffy, shabby rooms. The System they represent is as stuffy and shabby; one cannot, as in Osborne's realistic dramas, marry into it, or sneak into it, or even rave against it in self-expressive anger. The essence of the Pinter victim is his final sputtering helplessness. Although Pinter's God-surrogates are as invisible as Godot, there is no ambiguity about their message. They send henchmen not to bless but to curse, not to redeem but to annihilate. As compared to the long, dull wait for Godot, Pinter's victims are more swiftly stricken with a deadly weaponthe most brilliant and brutal stylization of contemporary clich on the English stage today. (p. 92) Ruby Cohn, "The World of Harold Pinter" (first published in The Drama Review, Vol. 6, No. 3, March, 1962; 1962 by The Drama Review; reprinted by permission; all rights reserved), in Pinter: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Arthur Ganz, Prentice-Hall, 1972, pp. 78-92. - At his best, Pinter is a dramatist of high urgency, clear color and unimpeachable intentions. He has the right kind of dissatisfactions and impenitences, the accurate chimeras, the anxieties, hungers and vertigos proper to our time. And he has a high degree of freedom from the expectations of audiences, an aloofness from the theatre conceived of as a place of mutual congratulation, a toughness, or blessed innocence, to resist most of the pressures to make his plays serve other purposes than their ownto prevent them from "commenting" on our condition, or offering explanations or providing us with solace.He has done what Edward Albee has only half donehe has broken through to a new dimension of drama, which means a present dimension of experience. (p. 93) Pinter's plays introduce us to a reality we do recognize as our own, though it is one which we cannot truly know until someone like him gives it its proper telling shape outside us. Yet in Pinter the action is not in fact much more than an introduction, the beginning of recognition and affect and change. The shapes he creates are skeletal and unfinished, as though they have known what not to be but do not yet know what to become. Having stripped away much of what is exhausted in conventional drama, having made a psychology that confirms or explains yield to a metaphysics that invokes, and having made the logic of narrative continuity yield to the terrifying arbitrariness of the way we really experience the world, Pinter hovers still on the threshold of a theatre of new events and new portrayals. [Note date of this essay.] Unlike Ionesco and Beckett, in whose light, especially the latter's he has so clearly worked, he has been unable to do more than present the reverse side of existence, the underskin of emptiness that sheathes our habitual gestures and spent meanings. (pp. 934) Richard Gilman, "Pinter's Hits-and Misses" (1962), in his Common and Uncommon Masks: Writings on Theatre 19611970 (copyright 1971 by Richard Gilman; reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.), Random House, 1971, pp. 93-6. Shaw [and] Arnold Wesker presume that one human individual understands another, that logical exchange of ideas is the normal mode of communication, and that human actions are capable of explanation. Wesker and Shaw, for example, assume that they fully comprehend the motives of Sarah Kahn or Major Barbara and can demonstrate, by cause and effect, why these characters act as they do; they assume in other words that there is a logic of action and of thought and that both are capable of dramatic exposition. Further, such dramatists believe it important to make clear to their audience the stages in the logic of thought or action; in fact, this process goes part of the way to prove the validity of the thesis advanced by their plays. And even where the dramatist is not proposing a precise thesis, these comments still apply. John Osborne does not set out to "prove" anything in Look Back in Anger, but he considers it essential

to provide evidence, for example, of Jimmy Porter's previous experience of suffering, his attitudes to the "Establishment," or his University education; the play, so to speak, advances from the point achieved by such evidence. There is a basic assumption that, given such-and-such information, a dramatist can document comparatively fully the subsequent actions and responses of his created figures. Harold Pinter does not make such assumptions. He is concerned with "subtle experiences" but he sets out to evoke rather than exhaustively to depict or narrate them; by suggestion, hints, variations in intensity of mood, and the like, he involves the audience in an imaginative comprehension of the dramatic situation, the seeming triviality of which masks its deeper significance. [The] more he writes the greater facility he develops to enter a universal situation. He does not set out to provoke sociological thinking or to address his audience on "Life" like Wesker or Osborne; rather he requires an imaginative response to the truth of human experience presented (with varying degrees of success) in his plays, and he thereby increases our range of sympathetic insight into the business of being human. And although Pinter denies that he uses symbols in any conscious way, his plays, though not fully allegorical, must be "interpreted" as poetic rather than prose drama. Evocative or disturbing speech, language which is an accurate reflection of colloquial English and yet reflects the mystery that Pinter sees as an inevitable feature of human relationships: this is the starting point for a consideration of his vision. It leads directly to what is perhaps the chief irony in his plays: the discrepancy between the implicit claim in any patois that it is the currency accepted and understood by all its users, and the dramatic fact that such language in actual usage reveals not complete communication between man and man but their essential apartness. "Every word you speak is open to any number of different interpretations" (Mick in The Caretaker). [This comment points to one of] the central themes in Pinter's dramatic work. "The terror of the loneliness of the human situation" is insisted upon time and again by Pinter. One means of demonstrating this fact is to show how he makes dramatic material out of the nostalgia for the supposed security to be found in the past, especially a childhood past, which appears to be endemic in our society. Pinter's characters frequently take refuge in nostalgic moods or attitudes, with the result that their insecurity and fearful loneliness are emphasized the more. (pp. 93-5) The settings Pinter chooses for his plays reinforce the feeling that his characters fear their isolation, strenuously look for security and cling to what shreds of it they have got, and are terrified at the intrusion of others into the private world they have created for themselves. A painting by Henry More Figures in a Setting (1942)comes to mind in this context. A mother and child, and two other figures are depicted inside some sort of fortified building, and the impression given is of a fearful humanity secure so long as it remains inside the fortification but having no communication with the world outside. Pinter's vision is somewhat similar except that his characters feel little confidence in their flimsy security. The key visual symbol is, of course, the room which appears in the title of his first play: there, as Rose says, "You know where you are"; it is easily accessible as soon as she leaves the outside world"It's not far up when you come in from outside"; and "nobody bothers us." When she is inside with her husband, she not only knows where she is but who she is; whenever anyone does bother her she is immediately suspicious and afraid. In The Birthday Party Stanley rarely, if ever, goes out of the boardinghouse, and in The Dumb Waiter the two hired killers, Ben and Gus, have no significance except within doors. They are never outside in daylight; they "can't move out of the house in case a call comes"; and when the outside world makes its presence felt either by means of an envelope containing matches pushed under the door of their basement room, or through the dumb waiter with its messages from a mysterious person above, the effect is always

sinister and threatening. Although this play lacks the stature of the others mentioned so farit has the air of a dramatised anecdotethere can be no doubt that Pinter creates a menacing atmosphere. (pp. 97-8) A Pinter character rarely indulges in abstract speculation: he is not of the same world as Wesker's Beatie Bryant (in Roots). His speech invariably remains close to the facts of experience whether that experience is "real" or imaginary, manufactured for the sake of impressing his hearers, elevating his status, or merely extricating himself from an awkward situation. Indeed, one of the fascinations of Pinter's dialogue is its psychological accuracy in the sense that, as in everyday life, the distinction between the truth which depends on verifiable fact and the truth to the speaker's vision of his own significance (which may involve anything from deliberate fabrication to mere exaggeration) is often blurred. And it is at these moments that an audience will find itself caught between laughter and serious acceptance. (pp. 98-9) Pinter's fascination with human isolation and insecurity, his awareness of a brutal world where mystery and tension are always suddenly liable to appear, his recognition of the humor as well as the sinister which are part of human experience, and his control of his verbal mediumall these features reappear in The Caretaker. This is undoubtedly his best play [note date of essay]. (p. 100) The audience is faced with a world of Kafka-like uncertainty; it is confronted with the question of identity at every turn. Pinter seems to suggest that man is a mystery, unknowable and yet fascinating, living in his own separate world which impinges only by accident on others equally separate, and it is these moments of impact that provide insight into the overall human situation. Cumulatively these insights add up to a view of man as moving further and further from a questionable innocence associated with childhood to the treacherous and evil world of experience; at once pathetic and humorous, man becomes a status-seeker looking for acceptance and security in a world that is unpredictable and has to be fought on its own terms; and because innocence has been lost, man cannot trust his fellows, does not frankly reveal himself to them, perhaps does not honestly know himself. But the insights are fragmentary and do not provide a definitive picture. Pinter rejects naturalistic completeness of detail because his insights are not validated or limited by such considerations; rather he presents details which are also images requiring of the audience an act of imaginative comprehension. (pp. 103-04) James T. Boulton, "Harold Pinter: The Caretaker and Other Plays" (originally published in Modern Drama, 6, September, 1963; reprinted with permission of Modern Drama), in Pinter: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, 1972, pp. 93-104. [Pinter] has a phenomenally sensitive ear for the real speech of real people. His dialogue is, superficially at least, of a devastating naturalness. He not only captures the vocabulary of real conversation but also the varied quirks of repetition, malapropism, tautology, spurious logic, and verbal incantation which pervade ordinary speech and which, hitherto, had been largely missed in stage dialogue that attempted to combine naturalness with good grammar, correct vocabulary and logical progression of its reasoning. Pinter's 'tape-recorder fidelity' has opened up a new dimension of stage dialogue; and as such it can be wildly funny. This knack of naturalness has led some critics to class Pinter with the social realists among the new wave of British playwrights, the 'kitchen-sink school'. The affinity of his work with this group of playwrights, however, is a very superficial one. For Pinter is not a realist in their sense at all. He is not concerned with social questions, he fights for no political causes. Like Beckett he is essentially concerned with communicating a 'sense of being', with producing patterns of poetic imagery, not in words so much as in the concrete, threedimensional happenings that take place on the stage. Like Beckett, Pinter wants to

communicate the mystery, the problematical nature, of man's situation in the world. However natural his dialogue, however naturalistic some of his situations may superficially appear, Pinter's plays are also basically images, almost allegories, of the human condition. (p. 66) Far from being a member of the kitchen-sink school , Harold Pinter is a maker of myths, a real poet, both in his subject matter and imagery, and in his use of language. For here too the naturalness of his dialogue is deceptive. It has the rhythm, the strangeness, and by its very repetitiveness, the incantatory quality of poetry. (p. 68) Martin Esslin, "Godot and His Children: The Theatre of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter" (originally published in Experimental Drama, edited by W. A. Armstrong, G. Bell and Sons Ltd., 1963; copyright 1963 by G. Bell and Sons Ltd.), in Modern British Dramatists: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by John Russell Brown, Prentice-Hall, 1968, pp. 58-70. - Harold Pinter has been writing long enough for the shape of his plays, their mechanism, to be easily recognised: a small group of characters in a complex situation; at first both characters and situation are presented obscurely but through a number of surprises or shocksoften contrived with an obvious ingenuitythe audience is led to a clearer and deeper knowledge of the characters. The action of his plays can almost be represented by a formula so that every revue can now have its pinter-play and at small art theatres sub-pinters flourish. (p. 122) In stage dialogue triviality can impress character intimately and subtly and can express unconscious reactions, especially in situations which obviously call for words of greater import. Pinter uses trivia in this way consistently, and is here in line with many more writers and thinkers of the present century. Through the usually "unnoticed" details of speech, Pinter, like some others at all times and like many writing today, can "let a penetrating eye [see] at once into a man's soul." He has outgone his predecessors most obviously in the ways in which he has seized on the audience's penetration. His dramas cannot be received without a continuous intimation of the unconscious lives of his characters. (p. 126) Pinter, and with him Beckett, have also discovered how to link gestures with dialogue so that they make a more subtle impression. The point can be so fine that a gesture has to be repeated frequently or sustained for a long time. McCann in The Birthday Party twice sits down to tear sheets of newspaper into equal strips. The first time he does so the audience may see only an intriguing piece of business but McCann subsequently rebukes Stanley for touching the strips and in the third Act his fearful concentration in tearing more newspaper communicates itself to Goldberg and its effect is to bring upon McCann a revealingly angry rebuke. McCann has been concentrating his attention; this expresses a need to escape from consciousness of fears. In Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Vladimir fiddles with his hat, at first inexplicably; but wtih repetition this becomes an expression of the uncertainty of his attempt to live by conscious effort. These gestures are no longer than ordinary behaviour but are slightly odd; they need explanation, and the audience is encouraged to consider them like puzzles until the slow exposition of the play reveals the inner need that actuates, explains and gives power to them. (p. 138) Such a physical language seems a necessity today. We understand that no man can be judged solely by the thoughts and feelings he can speak about and recognize: he is what he is by virtue of his unknown desires and needs as well. Recognizing this more clearly than earlier generations, dramatists look for a mirror to hold up to human nature that can reflect the unspoken and the unspeakable with more clarity of form and continuance of pressure than dialogue of statement or the indirect dialogue of apparent insignificance. Pinter's "dialogue" contains gestures as well as words, must be seen as well as heard. (p. 141) Pinter's originality is to be found in his style, and the aim of his style is to reveal

the varying consciousness of his characters; to understand all he writes and assess his achievement it is necessary to look through the web of conversation and gesture to notice the other slowly-moving patterns underneath. Even the interest of a play's action is here dependent on the half-hidden nature of the characters' moment-by-moment involvement. It was once said that The Birthday Party is a play with an exciting situation that is never developed. This is true in conventional terms, for despite its brief story the main effect is to give a developing knowledge of the characters. In all the plays, any slight change of situation serves to effect a change in the audience's awareness, to make half-perceived revelations click into place. Pinter's dialogue is contrived, so that, when a radically new situation is at last presented, the audience has already sensed the subtle and slow-developing movements which make it inevitable. If the final tableau seems right and necessary to the audience, Pinter's whole design has worked: the action and dialogue have the same inner compulsion. This fatefulness expressed in a play's action is not considered directly in words, but its effectiveness is inescapable if the actors have achieved any degree of success. And, to help them, Pinter has persistently maintained an intimation of the un-named forces behind the fashionable, accurate, amusing, everyday, trivial talk. The whole design is inextricably concerned with psychological issues, but that is not all. Each concluding change of situation comes with an added awareness in the characters of some previously hidden bias (as in A Slight Ache or The Lover), or with the elimination of other responses (as with Aston in The Caretaker), or with violence (as in The Dumb Waiter when Gus enters beaten-up or in The Room when Rose is blinded). In creating his complex dialogue and shapely plays, Pinter has found a means of showing a world of apparent triviality and helplessness that must submit to violence and challenge; only in these ways can his plays end. Pinter's drama has something of the rigorous dissection of Strindberg. It has more of that enlargement of the usual to gain both revelation and entertainment which is found, variously, in Freud, Beckett and Music-Hall performances. But this dramatist is no showman or lecturer; he does not comment, or sum up, or stop for applause. He relies above all on the deeply considered expressiveness of actors who are used to the scrutiny of film or television cameras and also willing to 'complicate' their performances. Stanislavski's training techniques would be wholly applicable for actors in Pinter's plays as in Chekhov's, but more depends on them; no other dramatist of subtle character portrayal, including Ibsen and Shakespeare, has made psychological expressiveness so entirely the central fact and actuating principle of his drama. The gains are paradoxical. The dramatis personae have become more normal, inhabiting the author's and actor's own mental and emotional world, so that any strangeness in the action seems like a representation of familiar fantasy and any violence a realisation of an unconsidered fear of violation. And at the same time the characters seem more imprisoned in conditions established before the play began and in the lack of any intellectually conceived means of escape; even the brief and fated development of their situations is inextricably predicated in all the petty decisions they make towards speech or action. On first hearing, or on impatient acquaintance, Pinter's plays, like his dialogue, can seem banal; their size, colour, delicacy and weight depend on the actors' ability to transmit under the text the deep and necessarily consistent truth of behaviour that they discovered in long rehearsal. If this is achieved in performance the author's world can become that of his audience, and his search for power and stability (or "truth") can enlighten its imagination. (pp. 142-44) John Russell Brown, "Dialogue in Pinter and Others" (originally published in The Critical Quarterly, VII, No. 3, 1965; copyright 1965 by The Critical Quarterly), in Modern British

Dramatists: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by John Russell Brown, PrenticeHall, 1968, pp. 122-44 - The shock-tactics of Harold Pinter's dramaturgy are so effective that his audience, cowed into the pit of irrationality, is afraid to ask why in the name of anxiety it has succumbed, and what it is in the play that gives them such insidious power. To ask the question at all may seem silly, because Pinter, we know, deliberately destroys all clues for a rational appraisal: the irrationality is the major part of the meaning. Everyone has of course experienced the menace and terror and loneliness which are generally applauded as Pinter's chief dramatic effects. It is not only drama critics who by sheer repetition have made us accept anxiety and alienation as the final account of experience. And yet we are right to ask the question, because the very deliberateness with which Pinter befuddles us hints at an ordered meaning which will satisfy the rational levels of our minds. Anxiety is a word to conjure with these days, but what it pulls out of the hat is only the shadow of a meaning. And if we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that the state of shock is enjoyable only if sooner or later rational relief is in sight. In spite of the clever dislocation of common sense, Pinter's plays affect us because they are about the middle-class family, both as sheltering home longed for and dreamed of and as many-tentacled monster strangling its victim. It does not, after all, surprise us that there is more menace and irrationality in this dramatic material than in any other. The London stage since 1945 (to look no further) has been very much occupied with the family as a trap-door to the underworld. Whether the angle of descent has been religious, as in Graham Greene, or social class, as in Osborne and Wesker, the game of Happy Families has provided the entertainment. Pinter, however, is by far the most radical in breaking with the naturalistic conventions of drame bourgeois. For he burrows into dark places where it is of little consequence whether a family is workingclass or professional. If he is obsessed by the peculiar horrors of middle-class families, this is not within the larger view of social class, but simply because they epitomize everything that is horrifying in any family situation today. He makes us see that class distinctions are curiously out of date for today's theatre, and that a kitchen sink is no more enlightening than a coffee table. When such paraphernalia are made into classsymbols, they merely hide what Pinter knows to be the real drama. We cling to kitchen sinks in the belief that at last we have reached something solid and honest; but Pinter will have none of that. He destroys the predictable place of things, deliberately confuses and contradicts. As soon as a situation looks as if it were attaining a recognizable meaning, he introduces some nonsense, wild improbability or verbal play, and we fall once more through the trap-door. His plays consist largely of his dogged attempts to destroy consistency and any clue to a rational pattern. The act of writing becomes, then, the work of the repressive censor as much as what is usually thought of as the creative imagination. This would seem to account for the taste of ashes, the sterility which pervades not only Pinter's plays but the whole Theatre of the Absurd in spite of its wildly fantastic ingredients. But the interesting point about this censorship is that it in fact underlines, or at any rate circumscribes, the very clues it destroys. As a result the audience is insidiously attacked at a level where it hurts most. Pinter's plays are largely about the running away from certain family situations, and the faster the running, the clearer it becomes what he is running away from. Every trick in his repertory is supposed to distract our attention from those unappeasable furies haunting his mind. But their faces, or masks, leer and glower from the plays all the same. By dislocating our attention from the common sense view of things he makes us alive to primitive fears, destroys the rational faade of the adult mind, and lays bare regressive fantasies. He

does not put to secondhand use ancient myths, in the manner of Cocteau or Sartre, but discovers the infantile fears that lie at the roots of those myths, and that are the ultimate nourishment of the poetic imagination. There is another level to his plays, one he himself has drawn attention to. Much of what strikes us as irrational, comic or even idiotic, he says, he has merely set down as actually observed. The way people talk at or past each other, have breakfast together, or discuss the furnishing of a room is quite extraordinary enough if it is set down without embellishment or literary convention. But this strangeness of the ordinary Pinter uses as a way into the more fearful strangeness of the usually hidden. (pp. 703-04) The real power of Pinter's plays does not lie in the shock-tactics of the dramaturgy but in the terribly familiar situations they are supposed to draw our attention away from. We may not be aware of the obsessive fears of childhood which dominate Pinter's characters (or shadowy configurations that take the place of characters), but we are never far from them, and a Pinter play can trip us over into that neurotic world. The very shadowiness of the characterization makes his world more real, and makes it easier for us to enter it, to "identify." Pinter gets through to the level of neurotic obsessions by a radical break with conventional images of reality. He parodies the bourgeois life which plays out the neurosis. But his most remarkable achievement is that at his best his vision is not a fanciful distortion of reality, but has the effect of a more direct, honest understanding of it. This honesty is the strength of all original art; with Pinter it often reaches the extreme point of seeming naivet: the pouring of a cup of tea, the reading of a newspaper can become events fraught with climactic meaning. These are not, however, symbolic actions; their significance is genuinely in their being lived. Pinter has a very strong sense of what people really experience (as against what literary convention says they experience), as well as a sense of the mystery contained in the trite and banal. In The Room (1960) the blind Negro is not a symbol, but the real instance of extreme loneliness, of human weakness, who calls to the woman, and who must be kicked to death by the man unable to face such weakness in a human being. The idea of the room itself occurs in most of Pinter's plays. It does not have to symbolize some abstraction of anxiety. The actual four walls are part of our most important experience: to be inside a room, or to be outside in the open spacesthis elementary contrast is probably as closely worked into our emotions as anything we can think of. By way of such outrageously simple imaginings Pinter arrives at the most direct and also the most harassing view of things, and the banal is forced to reveal its mystery. Every poet knows that the world of mysterious dreams is to be found at the very centre of banality. But the obverse is also true: the most terrifying anxieties are caused by commonplace occasions. Pinter's plays are not about menaces and anxieties in some metaphysical realm, but take their life from the very heart of reality, the bourgeois family. And whether we like it or not, nothing could be more real than that. SOURCE?