ABSTRACT Title: Harold Pint.erlsPlay with Form: A Cross-Media Analvsis of His Texts. Degree: Doctor of Philosophy, 1997. Colette Barbara Stoeber Graduate Centre for Study of Drama University of Toronto Harold Pinter has taken fourteen of his twenty-eight dramatic texts through some process of formal adaptation across media: narrative fiction to radio and television; radio to stage and television; television to stage; or stage to film and television. This thesis examines Pinter's perpetual manipulation of form and content and the media through which they are expressed. Moving through a detailed analysis of thirteen of his works and their adaptations, this study examines Pinter's methodology in this process in a more focused and comprehensive manner than has been attempted in Pinter scholarship to this date. Pinter's work is of particular interest in a study of cross-media adaptation, for the self-consciousness of his preoccupation with his own modes of expression combined with his thematic concerns about the control and expression of meaning tie the form and content of his work and the medium through which they are expressed in a very explicit way. Since the medium is so bound to Pinter's meaning, when the medium changes the play's thematics are often significantly altered. This study is organized into chapter headings according to the originally intended medium: narrative fiction, radio, television, and the stage. Each chapter first considers the original texts, focusing particularly on how meaning has been shaped and influenced by the intended mode of expression. I then turn to examine Pinter's manipulation of form and content through adaptation, in the process of which the meaning of the texts will be reconsidered in light of the new medium. In some of the thirteen cases, the meaning of the work is so intimately tied to its original form that the change of medium seems to preclude satisfactory thematic translation. We see this in the stage adaptations of the radio plays The Dwarfs and Sliqht Ache and also in the television version of Old Times. In most cases, however, Pinter embraces the new medium--recognizing its potentials and limitations--and manipulates the text from within to rework the perspectives of the original. In these cases, the playwright's adaptations of his original works staK as aesthetically realized and independent works of art. iii Table of Contents Introduction Chapter One: Dramatizing Narrative Fiction. Accident ~heoriesof Narrative Fiction. The Basement Tea Party The Dwarfs Chapter Two: From Radio to Stage and Television. The Tradition of Radio Drama The Dwarfs A Sliqht Ache A Niqht Out Chapter Three: From Television to Stage. Niqht School The Stage Image versus Television Image The Basement and Tea Party The Collection The Lover Chapter Four: From Stage to Screen. The Caretaker The Birthday Partv and The Homecominq Old Times and Betrayal Conclusion Notes Works Cited Introduction In 1955, Harold Pinter wrote: "Of course I recognise forms and employ them, or rather, go to meet them--a continuous voyage, and my seed within them, they expand or snap. There is no such thing as a static mode of expression. There is no form which does not take alteration with one artist's approach" (qtd. in Esslin Peopled Wound 228). This thesis is an exploration of Pinter's play with form. More specifically, it is an investigation into his habit of working and reworking his own material--his perpetual manipulation of form and content and the media through which they are expressed. Of Pinter's twenty-eight dramatic texts (excluding his Revue Sketches of 19591, eleven were originally written for some medium other than the stage: five for radio (A Sliqht Ache, The Dwarfs, A Niqht Out, Landscape, and Family Voices), and six for television (Niqht School, The Collection, The Lover, Tea Party, The Basement, and Monoloque). Furthermore, Pinter has taken fourteen of his twenty-eight dramatic texts through some process of formal adaptation across media: print to radio and television: radio to stage and television; television to stage; or stage to film and television. Many of these have undergone not just one, but multiple shifts in medium. The Dwarfs, for example, was 2 originally conceived in the form of a novel in the early 1950rs,dramatized for radio in 1960, and then finally adapted for the stage in the late sixties. Moving through a detailed analysis of thirteen of Pinter's plays and their adaptations, this thesis examines his methodology in this process in a more focused and comprehensive manner than has been attempted in Pinter scholarship to this date.' Central to all of Pinter's work, and integral to a consideration of his adaptation methodology, is his primary concern with the text. In response to a question from Me1 Gussow regarding Pinter's favourite directors, Pinter says, "Those three [Peter Hall, David Leveaux, and David Jones] and me, make it four, have one thing in common, which is absolute concentration on the text. Those three have a real sense of language and the shape of language, on stage" (Gussow 146). For Pinter, language has not only been the foundation of his dramatic form, but it is also the grist for his profound dramatic tension: words provide both the framework and the substance for his thematic explorations of the human condition. Pinter's common theme of ambiguity--or as he phrases it, the "highly ambiguous business" of language ("Writing for Myself" 14)--complicates the centrality of language as his chosen form of artistic expression. Pinter's consistent and focused preoccupation has been with questions of communication, language, meaning, and expression. His texts and the characters within them consistently express a profound, and most often well-founded, distrust of the linguistic process. Building upon these sceptical musings, pinter's work raises questions about verification and perception, and explores the disjunction between objective and subjective perspectives of reality. In spite of the abstract nature of these philosophical thematic concerns, however, the linguistic process in Pinter's plays has very real, and potentially dangerous, effects. In 1988, he told Gussow, "I feel the question of how power is used and how violence is used, how you terrorize somebody, how you subjugate somebody, has always been alive in my work" (Gussow 73). For Pinter, these questions of power have centred on the power of words, or more specifically, on the power wielded through manipulation and control of language. This preoccupation is explicitly realized in the case of Pinter's 1988 play Mountain Lanquaqe, which is, as he says, "about suppression of language and the loss of freedom of expression" (Gussow 68). In this play, Pinter explores the relationship between an army and its victims, focusing particularly on the former's oppressive act of suppressing the victims'language and imposing its own brutal and violent language of terrorism. While this play represents Pinter's most direct statement about language and power, he recognizes the simmering presence of these tensions through his earlier work as well. Speaking of a 1989 double bill production of Mountain Lanquaqe and The Birthdav Partv (1958), Pinter observes, "Both of them have to do with oppression and the individual, and I think it is a very odd echo to find after all these years that both plays are finally referring to the same thing" (Gussow 86). of course, in spite of his avowed focus on the text, Pinter clearly is a precise and powerful maker of visual images. While Mountain Lanquaqe is a play about and of words, it is also, as Pinter himself describes it, a "series of short, sharp, brutal images" (Gussow 70). Many of his stage images haTle become as evocative of his oeuvre as Pinteresque dialogue: the silent character of Mick standing and staring at the suspended bucket in The Caretaker and the final tableau of The Homecominq come vividly to mind. In a 1961 interview with New Theatre Maqazine, Pinter stated, "I always write in direct relation to the visual image of people walking about and standing on the stage" ("HaroldPinter Replies" 10). Of course these images, like Pinter's words, are plagued by ambiguity. For in spite of their vivid sharpness, Pinter's images are often destabilized through thematic questions of perspective and verification. Pinter explores the boundaries of objective and subjective realities, particularly in the electronic media. Through clashing or distorted images, Pinter posits the truth that there can be no objective truth. Beyond the evocative nature of these images in and of themselves, however, are their ramifications when combined with Pinter's words, for in Pinter's texts meaning is often made through disjunction rather than correlation between language and image. The tension of this irony seems particularly unique to Pinter's work, stemming largely from his emphasis on linguistic and iconic ambiguity. The overwhelming play of sub-text in his work often shifts the weight of signification to the image: the audience relies on the image--the physical relationship of the characters, eye contact, gestures, etc--to understand the dramatic action taking place below or beyond the literal words. Pinter is thus constantly concerned with questions of "meaning" on both thematic and formal levels. The self- consciousness of his preoccupation with his own language and mode of expression, combined with his thematic concerns about the creation, control, and expression of meaning, cement the form and content of his work and the medium through which they are expressed in a very explicit way. The implications of a medium shift are uniquely weighted for a Pinter text: since the meaning is so bound to the medium, when the medium changes, the play's thematics are significantly altered.