Name
: Jethwa Monali A
Paper :
9 The Modernist literature
Unit : 4
The Birthday party by Harold Pinter
Topic :
The chief characteristic of the play
Roll no :
20
Email Id :
monalijethwa19@gmail.com
Sem :
3, M.A Part: 2 ,
Submitted :
Depart of english M.K.B.U
Intoduction
of the
Harold pinter 1930- 2008:- ( London )
- Harold pinter was nobel prize winning english play-wright , screenwriter , director , actor.
- His best known plays : - The Birth day party , The home coming .
- He also directed or acted in radio,stage , television , and film produtionof his own.
- Pinter'scareer as playwriters began with production of The Room 1957, second The Birthday party.
- At the age of the 12 piner began the writing the poetry .
- His best characteristic is :- Pinteresque- Comedy of menace- The "Pinter silence"- The "Pinter pause"
Pinteresque
- That [Harold Pinter] occupies a position as a modern classic
is illustrated by his name entering the language as an adjective
used to describe a particular atmosphere and environment in drama:
'Pinteresque'–placing him in the
company of authors considered unique or influential enough to
Susan Harris Smith observes:
The term "Pinteresque" has had an established place in the English language for almost thirty years. Harold Pinter, or his works"; thus, like a snake swallowing its own tail the definition forms the impenetrable logic of a closed circle and begs the tricky question [sic] of what the word specifically means.
- Pinter restored theatre to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretence crumbles. With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution.
- Pinter's drama was first perceived as a variation of abusrd theater but has later more aptly been characterised as 'comedy of menace', a genre where the writer allows us to eavesdrop on the play of domination and submission hidden in the most mundane of conversations.
- In a typical Pinter play, we meet people defending themselves against intrusion or their own impulses by entrenching themselves in a reduced and controlled existence.
Comedy
of menace
- The Birthday Party – the comedy of menace - is a tragedy with a number of comic elements
– it
is a comedy, which also produces an overwhelming tragic effect.
- Throughout the play weare kept amused and yet throughout the play we find ourselves also on the brink of terror.
- Some indefinable and vague fear keeps our nerves on an edge. We feel uneasy all the time
even
when we are laughing or smiling with amusement. This dual quality
gives to the play a
unique
character.
- The menace evolves from actual violence in the play or from an underlying sense
of
violence throughout the play.
- It may develop from a feeling of uncertainty and insecurity. The audience maybe made to feel that the security of the principal character, and even the audience’s own security, is threatened by some impending danger/fear.
- This feeling of menace establishes a strong connection between character’spredicament and audience’s personal anxieties.
The
"Pinter silence"
- Among the most-commonly cited of Pinter's comments on his own
work are his remarks
about two kinds of silence ("two silences"), including his objections to "that tired, grimy
phrase 'failure of communication'," as defined in his speech to then the national student
drama in Bristol in 1962, incorporated in his published version of the speech entitled
"Writing for the Theatre" - There are two silences. One when no word is spoken.
The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed.
This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it.
That is its continual reference.
The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its place.
When true silence falls we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness.
One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
The "Pinter pause"
- One of the "two silences"–when Pinter's stage
directions indicate pause and silence when his
characters are not speaking at all–has become a "trademark"
of Pinter's dialogue called the "Pinter pause" :
"During the 1960s, Pinter became famous–nay, notorious–for his trademark : 'The Pinter pause.
- Actors and directors often find Pinter's "pauses and
silences" to be daunting elements of performing his plays,
leading to much discussion of them in theatrical and dramatic
criticism, and actors who have worked with Pinter in rehearsals have
, "reported that he regretted ever starting to write
'Pause' as a stage direction, because it often leads to portentous
overacting"
- His pause or beat comes naturally in the rhythm of the conversation. [As an actor, you] find yourself pausing in mid-sentence, thinking about what you just said or are going to say.…"
- Perloff said: "He didn't want them weighted that much. … He kept laughing that everybody made such a big deal about it.' He wanted them honored, she said, but not as 'these long, heavy, psychological pauses, where people look at each other filled with pregnant meaning'
- Pinter's having encouraged actors to "cut" his
pauses and silences–with the important qualification "if they
don't make any sense" (elided in Cole's headline)–has
"bemused directors", according to Cole, who quotes
Pinter's longtime friend and director as saying "that
it would be a 'failure' for a director or actor to ignore the
pauses":
- A pause in Pinter is as important as a line. They are all there for a reason. Three dots is a hesitation, a pause is a fairly mundane crisis and a silence is some sort of crisis.
- Beckett started it and Harold took it over to express that which is inexpressible in a very original and particular way, and made them something which is his.…
- Cole concludes that Hall added, however, that, in Working
With Pinter, Pinter "was right to criticise productions in
which actors were fetishising their pauses".
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