Harold Pinter’s Dramatic Techniques
Harold Pinter’s Dramatic Techniques
Name:
Parmar Dipali K.
Roll No. : 24
Assignment Sem. 3
Email Id:
dipaliparmar247@gmail.com
Submitted to: The Department
of English, MKBU.
About Harold Pinter:
He born on 10th
October, 1930 in London and died on 24th
December, 2008. During his life he has played a role of a playwright,
screenwriter, actor, theatre director and a poet. He was a Noble
Prize winner playwright. He had given 50 years of his life to his
career. His best known works are The
Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978).
His early plays
were described by critics as Comedy
of Menace but
later works like No
Man’s Land (1975) and Betrayal (1978) became
known as Memory
Plays.
Here we are focusing on his
Dramatic Techniques. So let’s see how he defers from other writers:
Harold Pinter’s
Dramatic Techniques:
Harold Pinter’s dramatic
techniques are related to:
1)
Setting
2)
Characters
3)
Use of time
4)
Situations
5)
Language
1.
Setting:
Pinter’s
plays are mostly “Drawing
Room” dramas.
If we see the setting of his
play The Birthday
Party, the play
starts with this description…….
PETEY enters from the door on the left with a paper and sits at the table. He begins to read. MEG's voice comes through the kitchen hatch.
The
same thing we can observe in his play The
Homecoming too.
Which starts like this……….
.... In the room a window, right. Old table chairs. Two large armchairs. A large sofa, left.
Against the right wall a large sideboard, the upper half of which contains a mirror. Up left, a radiogram.
2.
Characters:
As
Pinter uses conventional settings in his plays, he also uses
conventional characters in conventional situation and with
conventional language. There are characters like;
Meg:
An irritating wife
of Petey in The
Birthday Party
Lulu:
As a lively and
buxom character in The
Birthday Party
Max:
As an authoritative
father in The
Homecomings
Robert
and Jerry: As an
intellectual men in The
Betrayal
Pinter’s
characters are simple as we are watching real incidents in front of
our eyes. But when they start behaving unexpectedly, audience shocked
by seeing them.
3.
Use of Time:
At
some extent we can see Unity
of Time, Place and Action in
Pinter’s plays like,
The
Room, The Birthday Party & The Caretaker. In
this plays one event follows the other and time passes
Chrono-biologically. The time passes between the scenes are
equivalent to the time we spend in theatre in watching the play. Thus
it gives naturalistic presentation to the drama.
We’’,
in his all plays it is not true. For example in his plays Silence,
The Basement, Old Times, No Man’s Land, Betrayal, etc.
this Unity is
not maintained.
- In Silence it is impossible to frame the time which the characters are occupying.
- In The Basement the time is circular.
- In Betrayal time goes forward and backward. And it ends in past.
This alternation of time
affects both; actions in the plays and the minds of the characters.
So the distortion of time mirrors the psychological distortion of the
characters.
4.
Situations:
Pinter uses simple situations
for his drama instead of plots. So it’s difficult to retell his
stories. Less number of characters perform on stage and naturally
enters or go out. Pinter use devices that he found from comedies.
Absurd situations, comic scenes, slapstick, humorous characters are
found in most of his plays.
In
The Birthday
Party we found
absurdity in the scene of Blind
Buff’s game. But
it ends very seriously. These type of changes could be found in his
plays which leads from comic
to tragic or violent. Audience
laugh at the situation going on but narrowly if we study this is the
laughter which produces from the tension going on, on the stage.
5.
Language:
If
we study the language and structure which Pinter used in all his
play, there is basic similarity like;
- Dialogues are simple
- Easy to Understand
- Clear and Straightforward
In Pinter’s plays language
is closely related to the theme of communication. And to present
this theme of communication writer uses three devices;
A.
The use of Oral Language
B.
The non-verbal devices &
C.
Symbols
A.
The use of Oral Language:
In Pinter’s play when the
play starts we found two or three person in the living room and
talking casually. But as the conversation goes on the casualness from
the dialogue vanishes and we smell something wrong in the dialogues.
Let’s see the starting of The
Birthday Party… What time did you go out this morning, Petey?
PETEY. Same time as usual.
MEG. Was it dark?
PETEY. No, it was light.
MEG. (Beginning to darn.) But sometimes you go out in the morning and it's dark.
PETEY. That's in the winter.
MEG. Oh, in winter.
PETEY. Yes, it gets light later in winter.
MEG. Oh.
Petey and Meg’s dialogues
during morning breakfast, when Petey says in winter there is dark in
the early morning, after hearing this she gives expressions like she
don’t know this reality before and only today she came to know.
It is also characteristic of
Pinter’s plays that short exchanges should carry more meaning than
long speeches. In The
Homecoming one
of the main themes is ‘the
struggle for power’. In
the play each member of Max’s family struggles for power, demanding
recognition of status and self. Soon after the play starts there is a
short exchange between the father, Max, and one of his sons, Lenny,
where a competition seems to be taking place:
‘Lenny (...) (after a
pause): What do you think of Second Wind for the three thirty? Max: Where?
L: Sandown Park.
M: Don’t take a chance.
L: Sure he does.
M: Not a chance.
L: He’s the winner.
Lenny ticks the paper.
M: He talks to me about horses’
The conversation about which
horse will win the race is definitely superficial. Yet it clearly
shows that a power contest is going on. This is just the beginning of
the play. By and by the casual verbal struggle will become more
aggressive and violent and physical struggle will replace words.
B.
Non-Verbal Devices:
The
most different non-verbal device that Pinter use are;
Pinter
Pause
Pinter
Silence
i)
Pinter Pause:
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". For example in The
Birthday Party,
MEG. Is that you Petey? Pause.
Petey, is that you?
Pause.
Petey?
PETEY. What?
His pause or beat comes
naturally in the rhythm of the conversation.
ii) Pinter Silence:
His own work are his remarks
about two kinds of silence ("two silences"), as defined in
his speech to the National
Student Drama Festival
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.”
In
The Birthday
Party…
PETEY takes his plate to the hatch. Shouts. Laughter.
PETEY sits at the table. Silence. She returns.) He's coming down. (She is panting and arranges her hair.) I told him if he didn't hurry up he'd get no breakfast.
STANLEY I want to ask you something. (MEG fidgets nervously. She does not go to him.) Come on. (Pause.) All right.
I can ask it from here just as well. (Deliberately.) Tell me.
Mrs Boles, when you address yourself to me, do you ever ask yourself who exactly you are talking to? Eh?
Silence. He groans, his trunk falls forward, his head falls into his hands.
Pauses
and silences are used:
- to give a character time to think about what he/she is going to say next
- to avoid conversation
- to show extreme emotional strain
- as an answer to a rhetorical question
- to see the effect of what has been said to the interlocutor.
C.
Symbols:
In
his plays Pinter has used symbols like newspaper,
ringing of the bell, toy drum, knocking at the door etc.
are used symbolically. He is in the sense very intelligent writer who
is using each and every object found around a common people. In his
play The Birthday
Party…
Newspaper:
shows the
connection of every common person’s life with current affairs and
for McCann it is just a time pass.
Ringing
of the Bell and knocking at the door: symbols
something danger coming nearer.
I
have tried to give Pinter’s dramatic techniques in brief. I hope it
will be useful to all to understand the writer’s writing techniques
in better way. Here are the works that help me in this assignment….
Reference
- Gemetto, L., Harold Pinter’s Dramatic Techniques.
To Evaluate my assignment click on this image.
Thanku for providing such kind of blog it is very helpful
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