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Politics, Oppression and Violence in Harold Pinter's Plays

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Politics, Oppression and Violence in Harold Pinter's Plays Politics, Oppression and Violence in Harold Pinter’s Plays through the Lens of Arabic Plays from Egypt and Syria Hekmat Shammout A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS BY RESEARCH Department of Drama and Theatre Arts College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham May 2018 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract This thesis aims to examine how far the political plays of Harold Pinter reflect the Arabic political situation, particularly in Syria and Egypt, by comparing them to several plays that have been written in these two countries after 1967. During the research, the comparative study examined the similarities and differences on a theoretical basis, and how each playwright dramatised the topic of political violence and aggression against oppressed individuals. It also focussed on what dramatic techniques have been used in the plays. The thesis also tries to shed light on how Arab theatre practitioners managed to adapt Pinter’s plays to overcome the cultural-specific elements and the foreignness of the text to bring the play closer to the understanding of the targeted audience. Acknowledgments I would like first to thank my supervisors, Dr. Rose Whyman and Dr. Graham Saunders, for the infinite support and guidance I received from them during the writing process which was especially difficult for me. I will forever be in their debt. I would like also to thank CARA, Council for at Risk Academics, who funded this programme and made this accomplishment possible. Table of Contents Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter I: Politics and Oppression in The Birthday Party and Night Traveller ........... 10 The Birthday Party as a Political Metaphor ..................................................................... 11 Night Traveller: A Synopsis ............................................................................................. 39 Night Traveller and the Notion of the Absurd .................................................................. 42 Violence and Oppression in Night Traveller .................................................................... 49 Chapter II: Families under Political Oppression: One for the Road, Mountain Language, Cheers Homeland and The Rape ..................................................................... 57 Pinter’s One for the Road and Mountain Language ......................................................... 70 Mountain Language in Arabic, Two Productions in Israel and the UAE ........................ 86 Two Plays from Syria: Mohammad Al-Maghut’s Cheers Homeland and Saadallah Wannous’s The Rape ........................................................................................................ 93 Saadallah Wannous’s The Rape (A Play in Three Acts) ................................................ 106 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 118 Notes ...................................................................................................................................... 126 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………... 137 Introduction Harold Pinter is hailed as one of the most important playwrights in the modern era, and he was the first British writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature in the 20th century. He started his theatre career as an actor while his subsequent career in playwriting faced a difficult start, himself describing his early work as ‘unpopular’.1 Pinter was involved as a playwright and an activist with the politics of the time, which left its mark on his work throughout. He was born during the period of the Depression and in his youth, witnessed World War (WWII) and the Cold War. The influence of contemporary politics on Pinter’s work has been immense. Michael Billington suggests that had The Hothouse (1958), a play that is a critique of the authoritarian postures where a dictator-like character runs a prison for political prisoners, been published that year and not postponed till 1978, it could have established Pinter not as an exponent of the Comedy of Menace, or the master of the pause as he was deemed, but rather as ‘a dramatist with an active political conscience’.2 Billington emphasises the idea of political conscience because, in fact, Pinter regarded himself a conscientious objector in his youth.3 Witnessing WWII and the Cold War, and the USA taking aggression against Vietnam and interfering with Central American and Latin American politics had made the issue of politics central to many of his plays and much of his poetry. Examples of the influence of politics can be seen in the first play The Room (1958, first presented 1960), which brings haunting memories from the incidents of the WWII in Europe, mainly the Gestapo’s threat and brutality. Even more obviously, interest in political occurrences appear to influence the 1980’s plays One for the Road (1984) and Mountain Language (1988) and later plays, and in 1 many poems, particularly those he wrote in criticism of the NATO and The United States wars against Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan.4 Notable is one of the poems, American Football, which Pinter wrote in response to the American Gulf War against Iraq in 1991. Furthermore, Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, ‘Art, Truth and Politics’ shed more light on how his political engagement had shaped his work. Pinter was also a political activist. His first political activism could be traced to PEN International, the organisation defending freedom of speech and documenting oppression against writers worldwide.5 During the last thirty years of his life, he made scathing critiques of the governments of the United States, the UK and the NATO for being responsible for coups, political crises and wars in numerous countries. The domination of these major political powers over weaker states such as Chile, Nicaragua, Turkey, Iraq, and Serbia greatly concerned Pinter, and he expressed strong opinions in this regard in several speeches, newspapers, and more importantly in the plays and poetry that he wrote from the 1980’s onwards. It was Turkey, the Middle Eastern country that lies at the borders of Europe, that provided the inspiration for writing Pinter’s One for the Road (1984). Following a coup in 1980 in that country, violations of human rights were practiced on a large scale, civil liberties were curtailed, and freedom of speech was restrained. 6 Pinter made a trip on behalf of PEN, alongside with Arthur Miller, to see what was happening in person. Pinter later wrote another play which was inspired by the events in Turkey, Mountain Language (1988), which depicts the suffering of an oppressed people, the mountain people, whose language is banned. The ban on Kurdish as a language in Turkey was harshly enforced, and the Kurds, a minority in that country, had to suffer this situation for over two decades. Pinter held the United States responsible for the coup and confronted the American ambassador in Ankara. He saw it responsible for the subsequent torture and human rights abuses committed by the junta in Turkey, as much as it was responsible for violations elsewhere in the world, such as in Chile, 2 Iraq or Afghanistan.7 Violence taking place in the world became a huge concern for Pinter, and has provided images that inspired many of his later plays, from the two aforementioned plays to Party Time (first performed by the Almeida Theatre Company at the Almeida, London 31 October), New World Order (first produced at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, London on19 July 1991, first published in Granta in Autumn 1991) and Celebration (1999, first produced at the Almeida Theatre, London on 16 March 2000), to mention a few. The result is that torture, oppression, and violence became pivotal to Pinter’s political plays. Not far from Turkey, the Arab Middle Eastern countries had their share of political violence. The two countries covered in this study, Egypt and Syria, have witnessed several coups and been involved in wars with the newly established state in Palestine, Israel. The military governments in the two countries were initially seen as ones which defeated the ‘imperialistic’ and corrupt governments that succeeded the Western colonialism of France and Britain in the region. However, as these governments’ grip on politics grew stronger, more curtailments on civil liberties were imposed and those who challenged the authorities were persecuted, imprisoned, or even executed. Time has proven that promises of prosperity and the restoration of Palestine from Israel, which is a priority for the Arabs, were far from achievable by those governments. Particularly after the 1967 Arab defeat by Israel in the Six Day War, voices in Egypt and Syria, the two defeated countries, started to sound calls for reforms, censuring the political establishments and those
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