EVOLUTION OF HAROLD PINTER
After reading three plays by Harold Pinter I can do a relation between these plays and I
can see the evolution of this dramatist. But I had based this evolution in the references
that I have about his other plays and the critics too.
I can say that Pinter used some basic elements in his theatre: an enclosed space and
unpredictable dialogue where the characters are simples and innocents; in that plays
Pinter gets an absurd and certain ambient of mysterious because of the dialogue without
sense or the repetitions. His plays always occur in one space like the flat on Party Time
or the room on The Dumb Waiter. The characters could represent for Pinter something
abstract and sometimes without certain behaviour; in Party Time they live in the
materialism and they don’t worry about the problems of the exterior, they don’t perceive
them, they live in the moment of the social gathering only. So very critics considerer
that Pinter introduces characters without concrete expectations, they stay in the story
still the story finishes. For example, this occurs on The Dumb Waiter, in which the
characters are waiting for the order of killing the victim; Ben remains in the room and
he isn’t a person who has plans or abstract ideas like Gus. In that play is described the
absurd theatre of Harold Pinter because of the pauses in the dialogue and the simplicity
of the way, the protagonists spend the time speaking together and waiting for something
a bit eccentric. But The Dumb Waiter was written a lot of years ago and could changes
more and is more difficult to understand than the plays written later.
Harold Pinter uses the repetition, the pauses in the dialogue and a simple way to explain
the drama of the reality, in which the audience or the lectors have to reflect on the
profound themes that are in the plays. Because in his plays there is a mystery behind the
uncomplicated trama, and it’s hard to imagine.
Reading the three plays, “The Dumb Waiter, Ashes to Ashes and Party Time”, it could
be a better evolution because the first one was written early than the others. In these
epoch (at 1957), Pinter was considered a representative writer of British drama. This
aspect of his bibliography appears in that plays.
In the play Ashes to Ashes, Harold Pinter presents the action whit objectivism and
without conclusion, so the writer tries that the lector makes his own conclusion about
what he’s reading: Rebecca seems a normal woman who is living a normal live with
some bad memories; she is with a man, Devil, who seems a simple person too. What
can we think about the development of this trama? The same occurs in Party Time, with
the role of Jimmy, who doesn’t appears during the story but is named by the other
characters making a lot of remarks about him…But certainty the stories have most
importance about the real problems of the world, like the politic or the falsely of the
persons. In that way, I coincide in the similarities between the three plays, the aspects
that Harold Pinter uses to write his works: like the social culture and the social relations.
Finally, in this three plays I could see a certain evolution of the aspects of Harold Pinter,
but I had need some parallel information, a part of his plays, because the author is very
sharp in his dialogues. I can say that he uses the same mechanisms to write his plays,
and the thing that changes more in the three stories is the theme. I think that the
evolution is a bit constant.
ÀNGELA MARCO MARTÍ