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The World of Harold Pinter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2022

Ruby Cohn
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Extract

Each of Harold Pinter's four plays ends in the virtual annihilation of an individual. In Pinter's first play, The Room, after a blind Negro is kicked into inertness, the heroine, Rose, is suddenly stricken with blindness. In The Dumb Waiter, the curtain falls as Gus and his prospective murderer stare at each other. Stanley Webber, the hero of The Birthday Party, is taken from his refuge for “special treatment.” In The Caretaker, the final curtain falls on an old man's fragmentary (and unheeded) pleas to remain in his refuge.

As Pinter focuses more sharply on the wriggle for existence, each of his successive hero-victims seems more vulnerable than the last. Villain assaults victim in a telling and murderous idiom.

Type
Research Article
Information
Tulane Drama Review , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , March 1962 , pp. 55 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © The Tulane Drama Review 1962

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References

* Compare this description with that of Jimmy Porter's naturalistic Sundays in Look Back in Anger: “Always the same ritual. Reading the papers, drinking tea, ironing. A few more hours, and another week gone. Our youth is slipping away.”

On the other hand, observe Vladimir's clearly metaphysical routine in Godot: “Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be?”