Intruduction 3 Chapter I. Harold Pinter: The dramatist and his world 5

2.3 Pinter and twentieth-century drama

In 1956 Harold Pinter trod the boards in Bournemouth and Torquay in over thirty thrillers and comedies, the standard repertory company staple of the pre- and post-war periods,1 while J. B. Priestley, Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan dominated the West End theatre with comforting spiritualism, stylish comedy of manners and sentimentalised social problem play, all designed to reassure the self-applauding middle-class patrons, through laughter or tears. Alternatively, by the early 1950s, the plays of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams with their contrasting realistic modes of incidental expressionism (Death of a Salesman, 1949) and passionate naturalism (A Streetcar Named Desire, 1947) were quite free from the all-constrictive self-censorship of the British class system dominated by virtual terror of the vulgar and lower class. Along with changing post-war social conditions the seeming freedom signalled by the Americans provided an impetus for the rise of the Angry Young Men (pre-eminently John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and John Arden) at the Royal Court Theatre, from the annus mirabilis of 1956. Of equal importance, but less sensational in immediate impact was the translation of French absurdism, most famously Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco, to London productions at the Arts Theatre (respectively, Waiting for Godot, 1955; The New Tenant, 1956). With his outstanding success by the early 1960s, Pinter was frequently associated with the social realism of the Angry Young Men and with the
absurdism of Beckett and Ionesco. Furthermore, it is probably safe to say that there is not a single dramatist of the twentieth century with whom Pinter has not been compared or contrasted, from Ibsen to David Mamet. Beginning with the question of 1950s realism, this chapter then looks at Ionesco and Beckett and selects various dramatists with whom Pinter’s plays have been associated – namely Chekhov, Strindberg, Pirandello, Eliot, Joyce – and, as far as space allows, assesses Pinter’s debts, affinities or differences, to gain thereby a sharper recognition of his individual contribution to twentieth-century theatre. Plays like Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), Wesker’s Chicken Soup with Barley (1958) and Arden’s Live Like Pigs (1958) displaced the middle-class drawing room with the lower-class mise-en-scène of ‘kitchen sink’ realism and without condescension faithfully represented ordinary lives. Each had an implicit left-wing agenda deriving from contempt for the dominant middle-class values of past and present conservatism. Plays like Pinter’s The Room, The Birthday Party and The Caretaker2 with their realistic sets and hyper-real demotic dialogue seemed part of this movement, but only at first glance: ‘I’d say that what goes on in my plays is realistic, but what I’m doing is not realism’, Pinter recorded. In comparison with the realists Pinter did not speak from a recognisable political platform. In contrast, he deconstructs social realism by divorcing the identification of character and environment, defamiliarising the pedestrian and destabilising the audience with ultimately self-recriminating laughter. For the realists the accurate presentation of the material conditions of persons in society was a didactic end in itself. An exception in Pinter’s work was A Night Out, which he contributed to Sydney Newman’s ‘Armchair Theatre’ series for ABC television of the late 1950s, early 1960s. Newman, a Canadian, had been deeply influenced by the social realism of American television drama. A Night Out presents the social entrapment of Albert, an office clerk: intimidated by his mother, bullied by an office superior, blamed for a misdemeanour at an office party, he takes out all his resentments and frustrations on a genteel prostitute before returning to the confinement of home. The often-made comparison with The Birthday Party brings out the essential difference. Practically everything in A Night Out is explicit. Character and motivation are generally unambiguous, the circular plot supplying if not the satisfying resolution of the well-made play, a significance which is clear. Quite the opposite to the numbing circularity of The Birthday Party which leaves us aghast, asking where? how? when? why? ‘If I’mbeing explicit I’mfailing’,4 Pinter said. A Night Out was highly successful, but its adherence to ‘kitchen sink’ realism meant that it lacked that ‘core of our living…this ambiguity’5 which Pinter saw as his main dramatic concern.
Alternatively, the ambiguity of such plays as The Birthday Party and The Caretaker prompted comparison with the absurdists. Ionesco founded his anarchic, surrealist drama on a premise: the ‘Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose…Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.’6 Consequently the tragic is mixed with the comic, which ultimately liberates through recognition of the confining morality of society. Ionesco’s basic technique was a radical estrangement by literalising the metaphorical in concrete stage objects, and by defamiliarisation and deformation of language.