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HOUSE RULES
‘Don't let them tell you what to do’, Petey feebly advises Stanley Webber in the last moments of The Birthday Party as Goldberg and McCann escort the latter out of the boarding house that is his home. ‘I've lived that line all my damn life’ Pinter informed Mel Gussow in December 1988, reinforcing a statement he had made in the BBC programme Omnibus two months earlier to the effect that protest and subversion had always held a significant place in his drama. Though it is both difficult and facile to attempt to draw any significant parallel between Pinter's earliest writings for the stage and the later trilogy of plays which he wrote in response to implicitly political stimuli, it is clear that the anger and indignation that informed the writing of One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988) and Party Time (1991) was responsible in part for plays such as The Dumb Waiter, The Birthday Party (both 1957) and The Hothouse (1958). And yet, Pinter's reappropriation of some of his earlier writings to his active human rights campaigning in the 1980s and 1990s might seem something of a volte-face given his insistence in the 1950s that he was ‘not a committed writer, in the usual sense of the term, either religiously or politically’. However, Pinter's earlier repudiation of any social framework to his writing ought to be considered in the context of the developments of the European stage in the middle of the century, a time when Bertolt Brecht's writings and touring were stirring up debates about the function of our post-war drama. Playwrights were increasingly expected to come down either on the side of the new dialectical, political drama that sought to dissect historical and sociological models, or on the side of the avant-garde, those who would conjure allegories of the human condition. The argument was most notably illustrated in Britain by a series of open letters exchanged between the French ‘absurdist’ writer Eugène Ionesco and his harshest critic Kenneth Tynan in the pages of the Observer in 1958. Pinter felt comfortable in neither camp.
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