The Short Plays of Harold Pinter

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As quoted by Arnold P. Hinchliffe, Polish critic Grzegorz Sinko points out that in The Birthday Party "we see the destruction of the victim from the victim's own point of view: Continuing denial of the facts of Teddy's and Ruth's marriage and children may serve critics as a means of expressing their own rejection of what occurs in the play. [15] Knowing Ruth as she slowly reveals herself, it is easier, and likely more comforting, to dismiss the proposition that she had ever been a housewife, much less the mother of three children born during a six-year span whom she appears to have no intention of ever seeing again. The notion of a mother willingly, indeed facilely, abandoning her husband, and, especially, her children, to become a prostitute, must have been, especially at that time, almost unprecedented in "respectable" drama and literature and on the "legitimate" stage up to that time. ironically raises basic philosophical questions about the nature of so-called family values and the "meaning" of "love" among family members. [16] Ben’s silence is due to defending himself from the possible danger by their invisible master in addition to “is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness”. Also, on the end of the play, the 2 killers stare at one another by way of a long silence, a silence that occults “a torrent of language” behind it. So each aforementioned silences by Pinter happen in The Dumb Waiter. Teddy arrives with his wife, Ruth. He reveals that he married Ruth in London six years earlier and that the couple subsequently moved to the U.S. and had three sons prior to this visit to the family home ("homecoming") to introduce her. The couple's mutual discomfort with each other, marked by her restless desire to go out exploring after he has gone to sleep, then followed by her sexually suggestive first-time encounter with her dangerous, and somewhat misogynistic, brother-in-law Lenny, begins to expose problems in the marriage. She strikes a nerve when she calls him "Leonard"; he tells her that no one, aside from his late mother, has ever called him that.

In addition to the play being about Teddy's homecoming on a literal level, critics have suggested that, on a metaphoric level, the homecoming is Ruth's. That, symbolically, Ruth comes "home" to "herself": she rediscovers her previous identity prior to her marriage to Teddy. [4] While on tour with L. du Garde's A Horse! A Horse!, Pinter found himself in Eastbourne without a place to stay. He met a stranger in a pub who said "I can take you to some digs but I wouldn't recommend them exactly," and then led Pinter to the house where he stayed. Pinter told his official biographer Michael Billington, a b c Ben Brantley, "Theater Review: The Homecoming (Cort Theater): You Can Go Home Again, But You'll Pay the Consequences", The New York Times 17 December 2007, The Arts: E1, 7, accessed 10 March 2014. After a pause, Ruth accepts their proposal, conditionally: "Yes, it sounds like a very attractive idea" (p. 94). Teddy focuses on the inconvenience that Sam's unavailability poses for him: "I was going to ask him to drive me to London airport" (p. 95). Instead, he gets directions to the Underground, before saying goodbye to the others and leaving to return home to his three sons, alone. As he moves towards the front door, Ruth calls Teddy "Eddie"; after he turns around, she cryptically tells him, "Don't become a stranger" (p. 96). He goes out the front door, leaving his wife with the other four men in the house. The final tableau vivant (pp. 96–98) depicts Ruth sitting, " relaxed in her chair", as if on a throne. [4]After Teddy's marriage to Ruth receives Max's blessing, she relaxes and, focusing their attention on her ("Look at me"), she reveals some details about her previous life before meeting Teddy and how she views America (pp. 68–69). After Max and his brother, Sam, exit, Teddy abruptly suggests to Ruth that they return home immediately (p. 70). The Birthday Party. 50th anniversary revival at the Lyric Hammersmith, London, 8–24 May 2008. (Menu linking to related events; some links updated subsequently.) Pinter summed up his concept of silence in this quote of his, which can be considered his Pinter Pause manifesto: ‘ I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.‘– Harold Pinter Having spoken up a few times earlier to voice his objections, Sam blurts out a long-kept secret about Jessie and Max's friend MacGregor, then " croaks and collapses" and " lies still" on the floor (94). Briefly considering the possibility that Sam has "dropped dead" and become a "corpse" (p. 94), the others ascertain that he is still breathing ("not even dead"), dismiss his revelation as the product of "a diseased imagination", and ignore him thereafter.

Find sources: "The Caretaker"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( March 2009) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) a b Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 3rd ed., with a new foreword by the author (1961; New York: Vintage [Knopf], 2004). ISBN 978-1-4000-7523-2 (13). The Birthday Party" – Photographs from the Irish Classical Theatre Company's 2007 production, dir. Greg Natale. ("All photos by Lawrence Rowswell"; also includes production details.) According to Billington, "The lonely lodger, the ravenous landlady, the quiescent husband: these figures, eventually to become Stanley, Meg, and Petey, sound like figures in a Donald McGill seaside postcard" ( Harold Pinter 76).Like many of Pinter's other plays, very little of the expository information in The Birthday Party is verifiable; it is contradicted by the characters and otherwise ambiguous, and, therefore, one cannot take what they say at face value. For example, in Act One, Stanley describes his career, saying "I've played the piano all over the world," reduces that immediately to "All over the country," and then, after a pause, undercuts both statements by saying "I once gave a concert." [20] The Proust Screenplay (1972) — published 1978, but unproduced for film; adapted by Harold Pinter and director Di Trevis for the stage (2000); cf. Remembrance of Things Past Brian Richardson, Performance review of The Caretaker, Studio Theatre (Washington D.C.), 12 September 1993, The Pinter Review: Annual Essays 1994, ed. Francis Gillen and Steven H. Gale (Tampa: U of Tampa P, 1994) 109-10: "Here, real objects and stylized representations alternate and the three vertical structures [of the set] though not symmetrical, balance each other in a rough though pleasing harmony."

Poems in Translation: An Anthology Selected by Harold Pinter, Anthony Astbury, & Geoffrey Godbert (1994)One of the numerous factors about The Dumb Waiter is the evolvement of its characters and setting in Pinterian method. We encounter with the descent procedure of setting in The Dumb Waiter since in Pinter’s earlier works the room was respectively positioned in upper stair and ground. Arden, John. Book review of The Caretaker, by Harold Pinter. New Theatre Mag. 1.4 (July 1960): 29–30.