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Introduction Notes INTRODUCTION 1. William Packard, 'An Interview with Harold Pinter', First Stage, Vol. 6 (Summer, 1967) p. 18. 2. Of the handful of articles on this subject, only Leonard Powlick's Temporality in Pinter's The Dwarfs', Modern Drama, Vol. XX, No. 1 (March 1977) pp. 67-75 and Austin Quigley's 'The Temporality of Structure', Pinter Review, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1987) pp. 7-21 have appeared in drama journals. 3. Last to Go, The Birthday Party, Tea Party, Night School, A Night Out, The Homecoming, Night, Old Times, No Man's Land, A Kind of Alaska and Party Time all suggest a particular temporal sphere or occa­ sion and many of the other plays indicate a temporal or spatial preoccupation from the very outset of the dialogue. 4. See Andrew Kennedy, Six Dramatists in Search of a Language (Lon­ don: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975) pp. 172-3 and Elin Diamond, Pinter's Comic Play (Lewisburg, Perm.: Bucknell University Press, 1985). 5. Harold Pinter, 'Writing for Myself, Plays: Two (London: Faber & Faber, 1991) p. ix. All references to the plays of Harold Pinter are to the Faber four-volume edition, unless otherwise stated. 6. Martin Esslin, Pinter: A Study of His Plays (London: Methuen, 1977) p. 246. 7. Esslin, p. 246. 8. John Russell Taylor, Anger and After (London: Methuen, 1969) pp. 356 and 358. 9. Austin E. Quigley, The Pinter Problem (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975). 10. Quigley, p. 40. 11. Quigley, p. 276 12. This view of the past and of memory, which so radically qualifies naturalism as to almost redefine it, is not original. Bertrand Russell posits the same problem of the verification of the past as early as 1921 in The Analysis of Mind, Borges uses it on several occasions in Ficciones, Laurie Lee includes a warning about the distortion of memory in a prefatory note to Cider With Rosie, and at least two writers whose novels Pinter adapted for the screen make pointed comments on the lack of reliability of memory. Pinter, however, appears to be the first playwright to extensively investigate the dramatic possibilities of recreating the past. 139 140 Notes 13. See Chapter 2 for further discussion of this issue. 14. That is, if she is indeed alive at all. Pinter himself is not sure: 'There are many things I don't know about the play, but I have a very strong feeling that Bridget is dead.' This is cited by John Lahr in 'Pinter's Night Sweats', The New Yorker (20 September 1993) p. 109. See Chapter 5 for a lengthier discussion of this issue. 15. This discussion does not extend into the area of his early cinema adaptations. However, certain screenplays receive attention where comparison can be made to the plays or where the time schemes of the plays can be seen to have been affected by the medium of film. Generally speaking, Pinter's adaptations of other writers' novels and short stories are considerably less inventive with re­ gard to their time schemes than are his own plays. As expertly as most of them are handled, they do more to confirm his mastery over dialogue and his ability to pare away the non-dramatic ele­ ments of a tale than to enlighten us on the possible philosophical basis of his own approach to time or his dramaturgy with regard to time schemes. Even Pinter's adaptation of The French Lieuten­ ant's Woman, efficient as it may appear to some, is primarily based on solutions for excluding an unreliable narrative voice rather than on temporal considerations posed by the work itself. 16. Steven H. Gale, Butter's Going Up: A Critical Analysis of Harold Pinter's Work (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1977) p. 73. CHAPTER 1 THE EARLY PLAYS 1. Respectively from the stage directions of The Caretaker, The Birth­ day Party and A Slight Ache. 2. John Peter, Vladimir's Carrot: Modern Drama and the Modern Imagi­ nation (London: Methuen, 1978) pp. 1-21 and 316-28. As I under­ stand Peter, a 'closed world' or 'closed drama' (for which Beckett's plays provide a paradigm) is one in which both characters and objects are part of a temporal and spatial continuum that is both self-referential and fundamentally unrelated to the world outside the play. 3. Respectively, Martin Esslin, Pinter: A Study of His Plays (London: Methuen, 1977) p. 66; John Russell Brown, A Study of Arden, Osborne, Pinter and Wesker (London: Allen Lane, 1972) p. 329; and Terence Rattigan - cited by Arthur Hinchcliffe, Harold Pinter (New York: Twayne, 1967) p. 88. 4. Harold Pinter, Plays: One (London: Faber & Faber, 1991) p. ix. 5. 'Instead of being assimilated, the ordinary is replaced by the un­ likely'. Austin E. Quigley, The Pinter Problem (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975) p. 9. 6. Though Quigley's own view that 'darkness, associated with Rose's suppressed life, with her curiosity, and with the world outside, Notes 141 has entered the room in the shape of the negro' (p. 105) is appar­ ently quite within bounds! Admittedly, if Riley is seen only as a 'messenger of death', then the whole play changes radically and tends toward expressionist fantasy. But in focusing on errors pro­ duced by over-reductive guesswork, Quigley has not understood Esslin's point. In a play that he otherwise praises, Esslin sees Pinter doing exactly what Quigley describes, i.e. replacing the ordinary with the unlikely. His own symbolic interpretation or misinter­ pretation merely follows suit. The Room, which seems to adhere to surface naturalism, suddenly at its close becomes a play which invites, if not demands, symbolic interpretation. 7. If such a label were to be pinned on any of the characters in The Room, surely Bert would make a more plausible candidate. 8. L.G. Gordon, Stratagems to Uncover Nakedness: The Dramas of Harold Pinter (Missouri: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1969) p. 19. 9. Esslin, p. 65. 10. Pinter, Plays: Two, p. viii. But, while this, in his own terms, was 'the germ' of the play, it does not explain its progression from that image. 11. From an interview with Peter Hall, Theatre Quarterly, Vol. IV, No. 16 (1974-75) pp. 4-17. Extracts reprinted as 'On Directing Pinter' in Simon Trussler (ed.), New Theatre Voices of the Seventies (Lon­ don: Methuen, 1981) pp. 78-9. 12. For examples, see The Birthday Party, just before the entry of Goldberg and McCann: '[STANLEY] goes into the kitchen, takes off his glasses and begins to wash his face. A pause. Enter, by the back door GOLDBERG and MCCANN'. The opening scene of The Dumb Waiter is also punctuated with silences before the dialogue begins. 13. Robert Altman, who produced a television version of The Room, clearly felt that the stillness and the silence were untenable, so he has Bert painstakingly concentrate on fixing a ship in a bottle. This surely misses the point that Bert's silence ought to remain inexplicable. See Robert Altman (dir.), The Room, A Sandcastle 5 Production, 1987. 14. Trussler (ed.), p. 81. Bernard Dukore, preferring to use the term 'stage pictures' but effectively talking about the same phenom­ enon, traces this characteristic of Pinter's drama back to Yeats: '[The best writers of prose drama] keep to the surface, never show­ ing anything but the persiflage of daily observation, or now and then, instead of the expression of passion, a stage picture, a man holding a woman's hand or sitting with his head in dim light by the red glow of a fire.' W.B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1961) pp. 274-5. Cited by Bernard F. Dukore in Harold Pinter (London: Macmillan, 1982) p. 127. 15. 'Harold Pinter Replies: Pinter Interviewed by Harry Thompson', New Theatre Magazine, Vol. XI, No. 2 (January 1961). 16. Austin E. Quigley, 'Design and Discovery in Pinter's The Lover', in 142 Notes Steven H. Gale (ed.), Harold Pinter: Critical Approaches (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1986) p. 100. 17. 'If I am to talk at all I prefer to talk practically about practical matters'. Pinter, Plays: Four, p. x. 18. Pinter, Plays: Two, p. viii. 19. Pinter, Plays: One, p. vii. 20. Pinter, Plays: One, pp. ix-x. 21. By the same token, it is perhaps pure coincidence that the phrase is temporally weighted. 'Don't be ridiculous' or 'I've never heard of such a thing' might easily have been substituted for 'That'll be the day', but that is a speculation that leads us back into claims for organic unity and allows for no discontinuity. 22. Michael Scott (ed.), Harold Pinter: A Selection of Critical Essays, Casebook Series (London: Macmillan, 1986) p. 79. 23. Harold Pinter: Poems and Prose 1949-1977 (London: Faber & Faber, 1990) p. 33. 24. Exactly echoing Rose in The Room. 25. See Pinter's letter to Peter Wood in Scott (ed.), p. 81: 'But it is late. Late in the day. He can go no further'. 26. Quigley, The Pinter Problem, p. 64. 27. The film version emphasises this by showing McCann and Goldberg addressing each other rather than Stanley. 28. Ronald Knowles, Text and Performance: The Birthday Party and The Caretaker (London: Macmillan, 1988) p. 34. Goldberg appears as a father figure, yet consistently harps back to his childhood; McCann's tearing the newspaper into strips is called 'childish'; Meg remembers the children's home she was sent to as a small girl and fusses over Stanley as if he were her child. 29. Harold Hobson, The Sunday Times, 25 May 1958. 30. Harold Hobson, The Sunday Times, 3 June 1965.
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