Comedy of menace
Encyclopedia
Comedy of menace is a term used to describe the plays of David Campton
, Nigel Dennis
, N. F. Simpson
, and Harold Pinter
by drama critic Irving Wardle
, borrowed from the subtitle of Campton's play The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace, in reviewing Pinter's and Campton's plays in Encore in 1958. (Campton's subtitle Comedy of Menace is a jocular play-on-words derived from comedy of manners
—menace being manners pronounced with somewhat of a Judeo-English accent.)
In "Comedy of Menace", as Merritt observes, on the basis of his experience of The Birthday Party and others' accounts of the other two plays, Wardle proposes that "Comedy enables the committed agents and victims of destruction to come on and off duty; to joke about the situation while oiling a revolver; to display absurd or endearing features behind their masks of implacable resolution; to meet … in paper hats for a game of blind man's buff"; he suggests how "menace" in Pinter's plays "stands for something more substantial: destiny," and that destiny, "handled in this way—not as an austere exercise in classicism, but as an incurable disease which one forgets about most of the time and whose lethal reminders may take the form of a joke—is an apt dramatic motif for an age of conditioned behaviour in which orthodox man is a willing collaborator in his own destruction" (Wardle, "Comedy of Menace" 33; rpt. in The Encore Reader 91).
"Just two years later" (1960), however, Wardle retracted "Comedy of Menace" in his review of The Caretaker
, stating: "On the strength of 'The Birthday Party' and the pair of one-acters, I rashly applied the phrase 'comedy of menace' to Pinter's writing. I now take it back" ("There's Music" 130, as qtd. in Merritt 225–26).
After Wardle's retraction of comedy of menace as he had applied it to Pinter's writing, Pinter himself also occasionally disavowed it and questioned its relevance to his work (as he also did with his own offhand but apt statement that his plays are about "the weasel under the cocktail cabinet"). For example, in December 1971, in his interview with Pinter about Old Times
, Mel Gussow
recalled that "After The Homecoming
[Pinter] said that [he] 'couldn't any longer stay in the room with this bunch of people who opened doors and came in and went out. Landscape
and Silence
[the two short poetic memory plays that were written between The Homecoming and Old Times] are in a very different form. There isn't any menace at all.' " Later, when Gussow asked Pinter to expand on his view that he had "tired" of "menace", Pinter added: "when I said that I was tired of menace, I was using a word that I didn't coin. I never thought of menace myself. It was called 'comedy of menace' quite a long time ago [1958]. I never stuck categories on myself, or on any of us [playwrights]. But if what I understand the word menace to mean is certain elements that I have employed in the past in the shape of a particular play, then I don't think it's worthy of much more exploration" (Gussow, Conversations with Pinter 18, 24).
Despite Wardle's retraction of comedy of menace (and Pinter's later qualifications), Comedy of menace and comedies of menace caught on and have been prevalent since the late 1950s in advertisements and in critical accounts, notices, and reviews to describe Pinter's early plays and some of his later work as well. As Merritt points out, among other examples of critics' usage of this and similar categories of Pinter's work, after Gussow's 1971 "conversation" with Pinter, "Though he echoes Wardle's concept, Gussow seems to avoid using comedy of menace when reviewing the CSC Repertory Theatre's 1988 production of The Birthday Party. While still emphasizing Pinter's 'terrors' and the 'shiver beneath the laughter,' Gussow describes the play as 'a play of intrigue, with an underlying motif of betrayal' … [and] [Bernard F.] Dukore calls the play 'a comedy (of menace or otherwise)' … (Merritt 10).
In discussing the first production of Pinter's first full-length play, The Birthday Party
(1958), which followed his first play, The Room (1957), his authorised official biographer Michael Billington
points out that Wardle "once excellently" described its setting (paraphrasing Wardle), as "a banal living-room [which] opens up to the horrors of modern history" (Billington 86).
The Dumb Waiter (1960)
In his second one-act play, The Dumb Waiter
(1960), as accentuated through the 2008 film by Martin McDonagh
closely resembling and markedly influenced by it, In Bruges
, "Pinter conveys the idea of political terror through the staccato rhythms of music-hall
cross-talk and the urban thriller: Hackney Empire
cross-fertilises with Hemingway
's The Killers
[1927]" (Billington 90), one of Pinter's own acknowledged early influences, along with Franz Kafka
(348–49); Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, such as William Shakespeare
, John Webster
, and Cyril Tourneur
, whose work his schoolmaster Joseph Brearley had introduced to him; Samuel Beckett
(mostly his novels [43]); and black-and-white American movies of the 1940s and 1950s.
"A near-perfect play about the testiness of a collapsing partnership and the divide-and-rule tactics of authority," according to Billington, The Dumb Waiter focuses on two characters, Gus and Ben; Gus is "the man who questions the agreed system and who is ultimately destroyed by his quest for meaning"; Ben, "the man who blindly obeys orders and thereby places himself at risk. (If the system can arbitrarily dispose of his partner, why not of him?)" (92). As Pinter's The Dumb Waiter has been categorised as a "comedy of menace," so may be McDonagh's In Bruges, as it closely resembles it; yet, despite the comedy and the sense of threat growing out of the menace, these works of Pinter and McDonagh are, in Pinter's words to Billington, also "doing something which can be described as political" (92). At the same time, [Pinter] had – and still [in 1996 through to the time of his death in 2008] has – an acute sense of the fragility of earthly happiness and of the terrors that haunt us even from infancy" (92).
The "punning title" of The Dumb Waiter, Billington observes, "carries several layers of meaning": "It obviously refers to the antique serving-hatch that despatches [sic] ever more grotesque orders for food to these bickering gunmen"—the dumbwaiter
; "But it also applies to Gus, who, troubled by the nature of the mission [their next job as hitmen] to realise he is its chosen target; or, indeed to Ben, who, by his total obedience to a higher authority that forces him to eliminate his partner, exposes his own vulnerability" (89). As Gus "dumbly" awaits his fate, he may be a subservient partner who awaits orders from the "senior partner" Ben, but Ben too is subservient to The Powers That Be, a contemporary variation on Deus ex machina
, manipulating both the mechanical dumbwaiter and them through its increasingly extravagant and thus comically inconvenient "orders" for increasingly exotic dishes, unnerving both of them.
Billington adds:
The comedy in this "comedy of menace" often derives from such arguments between Gus and Ben, especially the one that occurs when "Ben tells Gus to go and light the kettle," a "semantic nit-picking that is a standard part of music-hall comedy": "All the great stage and film double acts – Jewel
and Warriss
, Abbott and Costello
– fall into this kind of verbal worrying in which the bullying 'male' straight man issues instructions which are questioned by the more literal-minded 'female' partner" —
As Billington observes further,
"Everything" in The Dumb Waiter, Billington observes, "contributes towards a necessary end"; for, "the image, as Pete says in [Pinter's only novel] The Dwarfs, stands in exact correspondence and relation to the idea" (91). In this example, the central image and central metaphor, the dumbwaiter, while "despatching ever more unlikely orders," serves as "both a visual gag and a metaphor for manipulative authority" (91), and therein lies its menace. When Ben instructs Gus verbally, while practicing their "routine" for killing their next victim, he leaves out the most important line, which instructs Gus to "take out" his "gun" (Pinter, The Dumb Waiter 114–15):
The crucial significance of the omission becomes clear only at the very end of the play, when "Gus enters through the door stage-right – the one marked for the intended victim – stripped of his gun and holster"; it becomes clear that he is going to be "Ben's target" (Billington 92), as Ben's "revolver [is] levelled at the door", though the play ends before Ben fires any shot (Pinter, The Dumb Waiter 121).
The Caretaker (1960)
In an entry on Pinter for the 1969 edition of The Encyclopedia of World Drama cited by Merritt, Wardle repeats and updates some of his first perspective on comedy of menace as he had applied it initially to Pinter's writing:
Despite those more-recent caveats regarding applying the phrase that he himself initially coined for Pinter's writing to The Caretaker—only the second of Pinter's full-length plays produced by then and the one that launched his career as a successful playwright in 1960 (Merritt 9, 226) —and to Pinter's later plays, scenes in both acts of The Caretaker in which Mick confronts an unsuspecting Davies and scares him almost speechless (Pinter, The Caretaker 129, 146) also epitomise how comedy and menace still co-exist in Pinter's text and on Pinter's stage.
The comic aspects of this play multiply, reaching a crescendo in Mick's monologue in Act Two describing his "deepest wishes" for decorating the attic room (161, 173) and falling with Davies, a tramp taken in out of the cold by his brother, suggesting that "if" he can "just get down to Sidcup" to get his "papers" and "sort" himself "out" (113–16, 164), his refrain and excuse for everything (153, 175–79), he might just be able to accomplish Mick's hyperbolic pipe dream and "decorate the attic room out for [Mick]" (164), leading Mick to accuse Davies of misrepresenting himself as "an experienced first-class professional interior and exterior decorator" (172–74), an absurd conclusion, given the tangible evidence of the down-and-out Davies before Mick (and the audience).
Pinter's friend the late film and stage director David Jones
, who directed the play for the Roundabout Theatre, in New York City
, in 2003 (having previously directed Pinter's 1983 film of Betrayal
, as well as other works by or featuring him), reminds his audience that Pinter himself said, in a widely quoted statement, that The Caretaker is only "funny, up to a point" and that "beyond that point" is why he wrote it:
"Beyond the point" of the comedy (the "funny") lies the scary territory that threatens one's very existence (Billington 92), which Wardle and others commonly have "labeled" or "pigeonholed" (depending on one's perspective) as "menace" (Merritt 9–10).
Pinter's later plays
Though "comedy of menace" is generally applied to Pinter's early work of the late 1950s through the middle of the 1960s, including The Collection
(1961), The Lover
(1963), Tea Party
(1965, 1968), and The Homecoming
(1965), even Pinter's late plays, like Ashes to Ashes
(1996) and Celebration
(2000), his last two full-length stage plays, exhibit his characteristic amalgam of the comic and the menacing, a sense of threat or impending doom; there is less comedy and more menace in Ashes to Ashes, in which heavy echoes of the Holocaust predominate; a more comedy than menace in Celebration, where heightened comic dialogue outweighs the frightening undercurrents of terror, the terrifying, or the terrible.
Celebration (2000)
While reviewers and other audience members describe Celebration
as hilarious ("one of Pinter's funniest plays", according to Billington [404]), the nature of the relationships of two sets of diners (three couples) having dinner in an upscale restaurant (which some critics assume that Pinter modeled on The Ivy
, in London's West End) – "this is the best and most expensive restaurant in the whole of Europe" (Pinter, Celebration 364) – remains characteristically ambiguous; Billington describes one set of couples as "a strangely rootless bunch with a depleted sense of family" (405).
One set (the two couples seated at Table One) consists of brothers Lambert and Matt and their wives, Prue and Julie, who are sisters; the second set of diners (the couple seated at Table Two) consists of a banker and his young wife, Suki, who comically turns out to have had an affair with Lambert when she was 18 (Billington 104).
As the "maître d'hôtel" emits platitudes geared to elevate the nouveaux riches in their own imagined esteem ("I believe the concept of this restaurant rests in that public house
of my childhood" [Pinter, Celebration 371]), the "maîtress d'hôtel" appears to dwell on a peculiar past family and sex life (373–74), while the Waiter engages in "interjections" spinning fantasied impossible memories of a grandfather who knew writers, other artists, and various other public figures of multiple decades and geographical locations too far apart to have been experienced personally in one man's lifetime (367, 375).
Lambert and Matt reveal themselves to be rather uncouth bullies ("Teddy boys", according to some London reviews)—
who describe themselves as "consultants … Strategy consultants. … It means we don't carry guns. … We don't have to! … We're peaceful strategy consultants. … Worldwide. Keeping the peace (379). Strategy consultant could be a euphemistic
catchall for warmonger, manager of terrorism
, purveyor of counter-terrorism
, or orderer of covert operations.
As the banker Russell interprets their explanation, peaceful strategy consultants seems vaguely menacing: "We need more people like you. Taking responsibility. Taking charge. Keeping the peace. Enforcing the peace. Enforcing peace. We need more like you" (379). This speech stressing "force" (in the repetitions of Enforcing) occurs after Russell has already revealed his own ilk:
Lambert and Matt are distantly reminiscent of Gus and Ben from The Dumb Waiter; but distinctly less polite while living much higher on the hog. One imagines such characters
"strategically" plotting the "peaceful" rendition of others without any qualms while sipping Perrier
and simultaneously planning their next wedding-anniversary dinner celebration (perhaps with a different set of wives) on their mobiles
.
As the Waiter says in his apparently penultimate "interjection", in which one might detect intimations of mortality:
"Apart From That" (Sketch) (2006)
Pinter mocks mobile phone
s comically in an ostensibly-trivial wireless conversation, while still suggesting a residual bit of menace in the unsaid, developed as his last revue sketch Apart From That (2006). As Billington observes, this dramatic sketch inspired by Pinter's strong aversion to mobile phones is "very funny", but "as two people trade banalities over their mobile phones[,] there is a hint of something ominous and unspoken behind the clichéd chat" (429), as illustrated in the following excerpt:
David Campton
David Campton was a prolific British dramatist who wrote plays for the stage, radio, and cinema for thirty-five years...
, Nigel Dennis
Nigel Dennis
Nigel Forbes Dennis was an English writer, critic, playwright and magazine editor.-Early life:Born at his grandfather's house in Surrey, England, Dennis was the son of Lt.-Col...
, N. F. Simpson
N. F. Simpson
Norman Frederick Simpson was an English playwright closely associated with the Theatre of the Absurd. To his friends he was known as Wally Simpson, in comic reference to the abdication crisis of 1936.-Early years:...
, and Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, CH, CBE was a Nobel Prize–winning English playwright and screenwriter. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party , The Homecoming , and Betrayal , each of which he adapted to...
by drama critic Irving Wardle
Irving Wardle
John Irving Wardle is an English writer and theatre critic.He was born on 20 July 1929 in Manchester, Lancashire, the son of John Wardle and his wife Nellie . His father was drama critic on the Bolton Evening News, and a regular performer at the Bolton Little Theatre...
, borrowed from the subtitle of Campton's play The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace, in reviewing Pinter's and Campton's plays in Encore in 1958. (Campton's subtitle Comedy of Menace is a jocular play-on-words derived from comedy of manners
Comedy of manners
The comedy of manners is a genre of play/television/film which satirizes the manners and affectations of a social class, often represented by stock characters, such as the miles gloriosus in ancient times, the fop and the rake during the Restoration, or an old person pretending to be young...
—menace being manners pronounced with somewhat of a Judeo-English accent.)
Background
Citing Wardle's original publications in Encore magazine (1958), Susan Hollis Merritt points out that in "Comedy of Menace" Wardle "first applies this label to Pinter's work … describ[ing] Pinter as one of 'several playwrights who have been tentatively lumped together as the "non-naturalists" or "abstractionists" ' (28)" (Merritt 225). His article "Comedy of Menace," Merritt continues,centers on The Birthday PartyThe Birthday Party (play)The Birthday Party is the first full-length play by Harold Pinter and one of Pinter's best-known and most-frequently performed plays...
because it is the only play of Pinter's that Wardle had seen [and reviewed] at the time, yet he speculates on the basis of "descriptions of [Pinter's] other plays, 'The Room' and 'The Dumb WaiterThe Dumb WaiterThe Dumb Waiter is a one-act play by 2005 Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter written in 1957; it premiered at the Hampstead Theatre Club, on 21 January 1960...
', [that Pinter] is a writer dogged by one image—the womb" (33). Mentioning the acknowledged "literary influences" on Pinter's work—"Beckett, Kafka and American gangster films"—Wardle argues that " 'The Birthday Party' exemplifies the type of comic menace which gave rise to this article." (225)
In "Comedy of Menace", as Merritt observes, on the basis of his experience of The Birthday Party and others' accounts of the other two plays, Wardle proposes that "Comedy enables the committed agents and victims of destruction to come on and off duty; to joke about the situation while oiling a revolver; to display absurd or endearing features behind their masks of implacable resolution; to meet … in paper hats for a game of blind man's buff"; he suggests how "menace" in Pinter's plays "stands for something more substantial: destiny," and that destiny, "handled in this way—not as an austere exercise in classicism, but as an incurable disease which one forgets about most of the time and whose lethal reminders may take the form of a joke—is an apt dramatic motif for an age of conditioned behaviour in which orthodox man is a willing collaborator in his own destruction" (Wardle, "Comedy of Menace" 33; rpt. in The Encore Reader 91).
"Just two years later" (1960), however, Wardle retracted "Comedy of Menace" in his review of The Caretaker
The Caretaker
The Caretaker is a play by Harold Pinter. It was first published by both Encore Publishing and Eyre Methuen in 1960. The sixth play that Pinter wrote for stage or television production, it was his first significant commercial success...
, stating: "On the strength of 'The Birthday Party' and the pair of one-acters, I rashly applied the phrase 'comedy of menace' to Pinter's writing. I now take it back" ("There's Music" 130, as qtd. in Merritt 225–26).
After Wardle's retraction of comedy of menace as he had applied it to Pinter's writing, Pinter himself also occasionally disavowed it and questioned its relevance to his work (as he also did with his own offhand but apt statement that his plays are about "the weasel under the cocktail cabinet"). For example, in December 1971, in his interview with Pinter about Old Times
Old Times
Old Times is a play by the Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter. It was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre in London on June 1, 1971. It starred Colin Blakely, Dorothy Tutin, and Vivien Merchant, and was directed by Peter Hall...
, Mel Gussow
Mel Gussow
Melvyn H. Gussow was an American theater critic, movie critic, and author who wrote for The New York Times for 35 years.-Biography:...
recalled that "After The Homecoming
The Homecoming
The Homecoming is a two-act play written in 1964 by Nobel laureate Harold Pinter and first published in 1965. The original Broadway production won the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play and its 40th-anniversary Broadway production at the Cort Theatre was nominated for a 2008 Tony Award for "Best Revival...
[Pinter] said that [he] 'couldn't any longer stay in the room with this bunch of people who opened doors and came in and went out. Landscape
Landscape
Landscape comprises the visible features of an area of land, including the physical elements of landforms such as mountains, hills, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, ponds and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of...
and Silence
Silence
Silence is the relative or total lack of audible sound. By analogy, the word silence may also refer to any absence of communication, even in media other than speech....
[the two short poetic memory plays that were written between The Homecoming and Old Times] are in a very different form. There isn't any menace at all.' " Later, when Gussow asked Pinter to expand on his view that he had "tired" of "menace", Pinter added: "when I said that I was tired of menace, I was using a word that I didn't coin. I never thought of menace myself. It was called 'comedy of menace' quite a long time ago [1958]. I never stuck categories on myself, or on any of us [playwrights]. But if what I understand the word menace to mean is certain elements that I have employed in the past in the shape of a particular play, then I don't think it's worthy of much more exploration" (Gussow, Conversations with Pinter 18, 24).
Despite Wardle's retraction of comedy of menace (and Pinter's later qualifications), Comedy of menace and comedies of menace caught on and have been prevalent since the late 1950s in advertisements and in critical accounts, notices, and reviews to describe Pinter's early plays and some of his later work as well. As Merritt points out, among other examples of critics' usage of this and similar categories of Pinter's work, after Gussow's 1971 "conversation" with Pinter, "Though he echoes Wardle's concept, Gussow seems to avoid using comedy of menace when reviewing the CSC Repertory Theatre's 1988 production of The Birthday Party. While still emphasizing Pinter's 'terrors' and the 'shiver beneath the laughter,' Gussow describes the play as 'a play of intrigue, with an underlying motif of betrayal' … [and] [Bernard F.] Dukore calls the play 'a comedy (of menace or otherwise)' … (Merritt 10).
Selected examples from Pinter's plays and sketches
The Birthday Party (1958)In discussing the first production of Pinter's first full-length play, The Birthday Party
The Birthday Party (play)
The Birthday Party is the first full-length play by Harold Pinter and one of Pinter's best-known and most-frequently performed plays...
(1958), which followed his first play, The Room (1957), his authorised official biographer Michael Billington
Michael Billington (critic)
Michael Keith Billington is a British author and arts critic. Drama critic of The Guardian since October 1971, he is "Britain's longest-serving theatre critic" and the author of biographical and critical studies relating to British theatre and the arts; most notably, he is the authorised...
points out that Wardle "once excellently" described its setting (paraphrasing Wardle), as "a banal living-room [which] opens up to the horrors of modern history" (Billington 86).
The Dumb Waiter (1960)
In his second one-act play, The Dumb Waiter
The Dumb Waiter
The Dumb Waiter is a one-act play by 2005 Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter written in 1957; it premiered at the Hampstead Theatre Club, on 21 January 1960...
(1960), as accentuated through the 2008 film by Martin McDonagh
Martin McDonagh
Martin McDonagh is an Irish-British playwright, filmmaker, and screenwriter. Although he has lived in London his entire life, he is considered one of the most important living Irish playwrights.-Life:...
closely resembling and markedly influenced by it, In Bruges
In Bruges
In Bruges is a 2008 black comedy crime film written and directed by Martin McDonagh. The film stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as two hitmen in hiding, with Ralph Fiennes as their gangster boss. The film takes place—and was filmed—within the Belgian city of Bruges. In Bruges was...
, "Pinter conveys the idea of political terror through the staccato rhythms of music-hall
Music hall
Music Hall is a type of British theatrical entertainment which was popular between 1850 and 1960. The term can refer to:# A particular form of variety entertainment involving a mixture of popular song, comedy and speciality acts...
cross-talk and the urban thriller: Hackney Empire
Hackney Empire
The Hackney Empire is a theatre on Mare Street, in the London Borough of Hackney, built in 1901 as a music hall.-History:Hackney Empire is a grade II* listed building...
cross-fertilises with Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
's The Killers
The Killers (short story)
'"The Killers"' is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. It first appeared to the public in 1927 in Scribner's Magazine. How much Hemingway received for the literary piece is unknown, but some sources state it was $200. Historians have some documents showing that the working title of the piece was...
[1927]" (Billington 90), one of Pinter's own acknowledged early influences, along with Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
(348–49); Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, such as William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
, John Webster
John Webster
John Webster was an English Jacobean dramatist best known for his tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, which are often regarded as masterpieces of the early 17th-century English stage. He was a contemporary of William Shakespeare.- Biography :Webster's life is obscure, and the dates...
, and Cyril Tourneur
Cyril Tourneur
Cyril Tourneur was an English dramatist who enjoyed his greatest success during the reign of King James I of England. His best-known work is The Revenger's Tragedy , a play which has alternatively been attributed to Thomas Middleton.-Life:Cyril Tourneur was possibly the son of Captain Richard...
, whose work his schoolmaster Joseph Brearley had introduced to him; Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
(mostly his novels [43]); and black-and-white American movies of the 1940s and 1950s.
"A near-perfect play about the testiness of a collapsing partnership and the divide-and-rule tactics of authority," according to Billington, The Dumb Waiter focuses on two characters, Gus and Ben; Gus is "the man who questions the agreed system and who is ultimately destroyed by his quest for meaning"; Ben, "the man who blindly obeys orders and thereby places himself at risk. (If the system can arbitrarily dispose of his partner, why not of him?)" (92). As Pinter's The Dumb Waiter has been categorised as a "comedy of menace," so may be McDonagh's In Bruges, as it closely resembles it; yet, despite the comedy and the sense of threat growing out of the menace, these works of Pinter and McDonagh are, in Pinter's words to Billington, also "doing something which can be described as political" (92). At the same time, [Pinter] had – and still [in 1996 through to the time of his death in 2008] has – an acute sense of the fragility of earthly happiness and of the terrors that haunt us even from infancy" (92).
The "punning title" of The Dumb Waiter, Billington observes, "carries several layers of meaning": "It obviously refers to the antique serving-hatch that despatches [sic] ever more grotesque orders for food to these bickering gunmen"—the dumbwaiter
Dumbwaiter (elevator)
Dumbwaiters are small freight elevators intended to carry objects rather than people. Dumbwaiters found within modern structures, including both commercial and private buildings, are often connected between two floors...
; "But it also applies to Gus, who, troubled by the nature of the mission [their next job as hitmen] to realise he is its chosen target; or, indeed to Ben, who, by his total obedience to a higher authority that forces him to eliminate his partner, exposes his own vulnerability" (89). As Gus "dumbly" awaits his fate, he may be a subservient partner who awaits orders from the "senior partner" Ben, but Ben too is subservient to The Powers That Be, a contemporary variation on Deus ex machina
Deus ex machina
A deus ex machina is a plot device whereby a seemingly inextricable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object.-Linguistic considerations:...
, manipulating both the mechanical dumbwaiter and them through its increasingly extravagant and thus comically inconvenient "orders" for increasingly exotic dishes, unnerving both of them.
Billington adds:
This being Pinter, the play has a metaphorical openness. You can interpret it as an Absurdist comedyTheatre of the AbsurdThe Theatre of the Absurd is a designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction, written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, as well as to the style of theatre which has evolved from their work...
– a kind of GodotWaiting for GodotWaiting for Godot is an absurdist play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly and in vain for someone named Godot to arrive. Godot's absence, as well as numerous other aspects of the play, have led to many different interpretations since the play's...
in BirminghamBirminghamBirmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...
– about two men passing the time in a universe without meaning or purpose. You can see it as a cry of protest against a whimsically cruel God who treats man as His plaything – even the twelve matches that are mysteriously pushed under the door have been invested with religious significance [by critics]. But it makes much more sense if seen as a play about the dynamics of power and the nature of partnership. Ben and Gus are both victims of some unseen authority and a surrogate married couple quarrelling, testing, talking past each otherTalking past each otherTalking past each other is an idiomatic expression describing a situation in which people in a discussion proceed at cross purposes. There is a mismatch....
and raking over old times. (90)
The comedy in this "comedy of menace" often derives from such arguments between Gus and Ben, especially the one that occurs when "Ben tells Gus to go and light the kettle," a "semantic nit-picking that is a standard part of music-hall comedy": "All the great stage and film double acts – Jewel
Jimmy Jewel
James Arthur Thomas J. Marsh, known as Jimmy Jewel, was a British television and film actor.The son of a comedian and actor who also used the stage name Jimmy Jewel, the youngster made his stage debut in Robinson Crusoe in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, at the age of four, performed with his father...
and Warriss
Ben Warriss
Ben Holden Driver Warriss , known as Ben Warriss, was an English comedian, and the first cousin of fellow comedy actor Jimmy Jewel - allegedly being born in the same bed and brought up in the same household at 52 Andover Street, Sheffield...
, Abbott and Costello
Abbott and Costello
William "Bud" Abbott and Lou Costello performed together as Abbott and Costello, an American comedy duo whose work on stage, radio, film and television made them the most popular comedy team during the 1940s and 1950s...
– fall into this kind of verbal worrying in which the bullying 'male' straight man issues instructions which are questioned by the more literal-minded 'female' partner" —
GUS: Light what?
BEN: The kettle.
GUS: You mean the gas.
BEN: Who does?
GUS: You do.
BEN: (his eyes narrowing): What do you mean, I mean the gas?
GUS: Well, that's what you mean, don't you? The gas.
BEN: (Powerfully): If I say go and light the kettle I mean go and light the kettle.
GUS: How can you light a kettle?
BEN: It's a figure of speech! Light the kettle. It's a figure of speech! (Qtd. in Billington 90–91)
As Billington observes further,
This kind of comic pedantry has precise echoes of the great Sid FieldSid Field-Early Years:Sid Field was an English comedy entertainer. He was born Sidney Arthur Field in Ladywood, Birmingham, son of Albert and Bertha . Field spent most of his childhood at 152 Osborn Road, Sparkbrook, Birmingham.Field had entertainment in his blood from an early age...
– ironically [since the city is the setting of this play] a Birmingham comic – who had a famous sketch in which he played a virgin of the greens being hectored by Jerry DesmondeJerry DesmondeJerry Desmonde was an English stage musical, film, and television actor principally in comedies and drama. He is probably best known as a straight man to Norman Wisdom.Jerry is sometimes credited as Jerry Desmond....
's golf pro who would cry, in exasperation, 'When I say "Slowly Back" I don't mean "Slowly Back", I mean "Slowly Back." ' At another moment, the bullying pro would tell the hapless Sid to get behind the ball and he would vainly protest 'But it's behind all round it'. But, where in a music-hall sketch this kind of semantic by-play was its own justification, in Pinter it becomes a crucial part of the power-structure. … The pay-off comes when Gus, having dogmatically insisted that the accurate phrase is 'put on the kettle', suddenly finds an irritated Ben adopting the right usage. (91)
"Everything" in The Dumb Waiter, Billington observes, "contributes towards a necessary end"; for, "the image, as Pete says in [Pinter's only novel] The Dwarfs, stands in exact correspondence and relation to the idea" (91). In this example, the central image and central metaphor, the dumbwaiter, while "despatching ever more unlikely orders," serves as "both a visual gag and a metaphor for manipulative authority" (91), and therein lies its menace. When Ben instructs Gus verbally, while practicing their "routine" for killing their next victim, he leaves out the most important line, which instructs Gus to "take out" his "gun" (Pinter, The Dumb Waiter 114–15):
"BEN frowns and presses his forehead.
GUS. You've missed something out.
BEN. I know. What?
GUS. I haven't taken my gun out, according to you.
BEN. You take your gun out—
GUS. After I've closed the door.
BEN. After you've closed the door.
GUS. You've never missed that out before, you know that?
(Pinter, The Dumb Waiter 116)
The crucial significance of the omission becomes clear only at the very end of the play, when "Gus enters through the door stage-right – the one marked for the intended victim – stripped of his gun and holster"; it becomes clear that he is going to be "Ben's target" (Billington 92), as Ben's "revolver [is] levelled at the door", though the play ends before Ben fires any shot (Pinter, The Dumb Waiter 121).
The Caretaker (1960)
In an entry on Pinter for the 1969 edition of The Encyclopedia of World Drama cited by Merritt, Wardle repeats and updates some of his first perspective on comedy of menace as he had applied it initially to Pinter's writing:
Early in his writing career Pinter admitted to three influences: Franz KafkaFranz KafkaFranz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
, American gangster films, and Samuel BeckettSamuel BeckettSamuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
. . . . At that time his plays, more than those of any other plawright's [sic], were responsible for the newly coined term 'comedy of menace.' This phrase certainly makes sense when applied to The Birthday PartyThe Birthday Party (play)The Birthday Party is the first full-length play by Harold Pinter and one of Pinter's best-known and most-frequently performed plays...
. . . or to The Dumb WaiterThe Dumb WaiterThe Dumb Waiter is a one-act play by 2005 Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter written in 1957; it premiered at the Hampstead Theatre Club, on 21 January 1960...
. . . . But 'menace' is hardly the word for The CaretakerThe CaretakerThe Caretaker is a play by Harold Pinter. It was first published by both Encore Publishing and Eyre Methuen in 1960. The sixth play that Pinter wrote for stage or television production, it was his first significant commercial success...
, and still less for subsequent plays in which Pinter increasingly exchanged his derelict settings and down-and-out characters for environments of moneyed elegance (657–58). (Qtd. in Merritt 240)
Despite those more-recent caveats regarding applying the phrase that he himself initially coined for Pinter's writing to The Caretaker—only the second of Pinter's full-length plays produced by then and the one that launched his career as a successful playwright in 1960 (Merritt 9, 226) —and to Pinter's later plays, scenes in both acts of The Caretaker in which Mick confronts an unsuspecting Davies and scares him almost speechless (Pinter, The Caretaker 129, 146) also epitomise how comedy and menace still co-exist in Pinter's text and on Pinter's stage.
The comic aspects of this play multiply, reaching a crescendo in Mick's monologue in Act Two describing his "deepest wishes" for decorating the attic room (161, 173) and falling with Davies, a tramp taken in out of the cold by his brother, suggesting that "if" he can "just get down to Sidcup" to get his "papers" and "sort" himself "out" (113–16, 164), his refrain and excuse for everything (153, 175–79), he might just be able to accomplish Mick's hyperbolic pipe dream and "decorate the attic room out for [Mick]" (164), leading Mick to accuse Davies of misrepresenting himself as "an experienced first-class professional interior and exterior decorator" (172–74), an absurd conclusion, given the tangible evidence of the down-and-out Davies before Mick (and the audience).
Pinter's friend the late film and stage director David Jones
David Jones (director)
David Hugh Jones was a British stage, television, and film director.-Personal history:Jones was born in Poole, Dorset, the son of John David Jones and his wife Gwendolen Agnes Langworthy...
, who directed the play for the Roundabout Theatre, in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, in 2003 (having previously directed Pinter's 1983 film of Betrayal
Betrayal (1983 film)
Betrayal is a film adaptation of Harold Pinter's 1978 play of the same name. With a semi-autobiographical screenplay by Pinter, the film was produced by Sam Spiegel and directed by David Jones. It was critically well received, praised notably by New York Times film critic Vincent Canby and by...
, as well as other works by or featuring him), reminds his audience that Pinter himself said, in a widely quoted statement, that The Caretaker is only "funny, up to a point" and that "beyond that point" is why he wrote it:
There is always mischief lurking in the darkest corners. The world of The Caretaker is a bleak one, its characters damaged and lonely. But they are all going to survive. And in their dance to that end they show a frenetic vitality and a wry sense of the ridiculous that balance heartache and laughter. Funny, but not too funny. As Pinter wrote, back in 1960: "As far as I am concerned The Caretaker IS funny, up to a point. Beyond that point, it ceases to be funny, and it is because of that point that I wrote it." (Jones)
"Beyond the point" of the comedy (the "funny") lies the scary territory that threatens one's very existence (Billington 92), which Wardle and others commonly have "labeled" or "pigeonholed" (depending on one's perspective) as "menace" (Merritt 9–10).
Pinter's later plays
Though "comedy of menace" is generally applied to Pinter's early work of the late 1950s through the middle of the 1960s, including The Collection
The Collection (play)
The Collection is a 1961 play by Harold Pinter featuring two couples, James and Stella and Harry and Bill. It is a comedy laced with typically "Pinteresque" ambiguity and "implications of threat and strong feeling produced through colloquial language, apparent triviality, and long pauses"...
(1961), The Lover
The Lover (play)
The Lover is a 1962 one-act play by Harold Pinter. Pinter leads the audience to believe that there are three characters in the play: the wife, the husband and the lover. But the lover who comes to call in the afternoons is revealed to be the husband adopting a role. He plays the lover for her: she...
(1963), Tea Party
Tea Party (play)
Tea Party is a play written by Harold Pinter, which Pinter adapted from his own 1963 short story of the same title. As a screenplay, it was commissioned by the European Broadcasting Union, directed by Charles Jarrott, and first transmitted on BBC Television in the programme The Largest Theatre in...
(1965, 1968), and The Homecoming
The Homecoming
The Homecoming is a two-act play written in 1964 by Nobel laureate Harold Pinter and first published in 1965. The original Broadway production won the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play and its 40th-anniversary Broadway production at the Cort Theatre was nominated for a 2008 Tony Award for "Best Revival...
(1965), even Pinter's late plays, like Ashes to Ashes
Ashes to Ashes (play)
Ashes to Ashes is a 1996 play by English playwright Harold Pinter. It was first performed, in Dutch, by Toneelgroep Amsterdam, the Netherlands' largest repertory company, in Amsterdam, as part of its 1996–1997 season, and directed by Titus Muizelaar, who reprised his production, in Dutch with...
(1996) and Celebration
Celebration (play)
Celebration is a play by British playwright Harold Pinter. It was first presented as a double-bill with Pinter's first play The Room on Thursday 16 March 2000 at the Almeida Theatre in London.-Synopsis:...
(2000), his last two full-length stage plays, exhibit his characteristic amalgam of the comic and the menacing, a sense of threat or impending doom; there is less comedy and more menace in Ashes to Ashes, in which heavy echoes of the Holocaust predominate; a more comedy than menace in Celebration, where heightened comic dialogue outweighs the frightening undercurrents of terror, the terrifying, or the terrible.
Celebration (2000)
While reviewers and other audience members describe Celebration
Celebration (play)
Celebration is a play by British playwright Harold Pinter. It was first presented as a double-bill with Pinter's first play The Room on Thursday 16 March 2000 at the Almeida Theatre in London.-Synopsis:...
as hilarious ("one of Pinter's funniest plays", according to Billington [404]), the nature of the relationships of two sets of diners (three couples) having dinner in an upscale restaurant (which some critics assume that Pinter modeled on The Ivy
The Ivy
The Ivy is a restaurant in West Street, near Covent Garden in London. It opened in 1917 and is popular with celebrities and theatre goers. In 2000, the restaurant was awarded the Moët & Chandon London Restaurant Award for excellence....
, in London's West End) – "this is the best and most expensive restaurant in the whole of Europe" (Pinter, Celebration 364) – remains characteristically ambiguous; Billington describes one set of couples as "a strangely rootless bunch with a depleted sense of family" (405).
One set (the two couples seated at Table One) consists of brothers Lambert and Matt and their wives, Prue and Julie, who are sisters; the second set of diners (the couple seated at Table Two) consists of a banker and his young wife, Suki, who comically turns out to have had an affair with Lambert when she was 18 (Billington 104).
As the "maître d'hôtel" emits platitudes geared to elevate the nouveaux riches in their own imagined esteem ("I believe the concept of this restaurant rests in that public house
Public house
A public house, informally known as a pub, is a drinking establishment fundamental to the culture of Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. There are approximately 53,500 public houses in the United Kingdom. This number has been declining every year, so that nearly half of the smaller...
of my childhood" [Pinter, Celebration 371]), the "maîtress d'hôtel" appears to dwell on a peculiar past family and sex life (373–74), while the Waiter engages in "interjections" spinning fantasied impossible memories of a grandfather who knew writers, other artists, and various other public figures of multiple decades and geographical locations too far apart to have been experienced personally in one man's lifetime (367, 375).
Lambert and Matt reveal themselves to be rather uncouth bullies ("Teddy boys", according to some London reviews)—
Lambert's mobile phoneMobile phoneA mobile phone is a device which can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile network operator...
rings.
LAMBERT Who the fuck's this?
He switches it on.
LAMBERT (cont.) Yes? What? (He listens briefly.) I said no calls! It's my fucking wedding anniversary!
He switches it off.
LAMBERT (cont.) Cunt. (Pinter, Celebration 364)—
who describe themselves as "consultants … Strategy consultants. … It means we don't carry guns. … We don't have to! … We're peaceful strategy consultants. … Worldwide. Keeping the peace (379). Strategy consultant could be a euphemistic
Euphemism
A euphemism is the substitution of a mild, inoffensive, relatively uncontroversial phrase for another more frank expression that might offend or otherwise suggest something unpleasant to the audience...
catchall for warmonger, manager of terrorism
Terrorism
Terrorism is the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion. In the international community, however, terrorism has no universally agreed, legally binding, criminal law definition...
, purveyor of counter-terrorism
Counter-terrorism
Counter-terrorism is the practices, tactics, techniques, and strategies that governments, militaries, police departments and corporations adopt to prevent or in response to terrorist threats and/or acts, both real and imputed.The tactic of terrorism is available to insurgents and governments...
, or orderer of covert operations.
As the banker Russell interprets their explanation, peaceful strategy consultants seems vaguely menacing: "We need more people like you. Taking responsibility. Taking charge. Keeping the peace. Enforcing the peace. Enforcing peace. We need more like you" (379). This speech stressing "force" (in the repetitions of Enforcing) occurs after Russell has already revealed his own ilk:
Look at me. I'm basically a totally disordered personality; some people would describe me as a psychopathPsychopathyPsychopathy is a mental disorder characterized primarily by a lack of empathy and remorse, shallow emotions, egocentricity, and deceptiveness. Psychopaths are highly prone to antisocial behavior and abusive treatment of others, and are very disproportionately responsible for violent crime...
. (to Suki) Am I right?
SUKI Yes.
RUSSELL But when I'm sitting in this restaurant I suddenly find I have no psychopathic tendencies at all. I don't feel like killing everyone in sight, I don't feel like putting a bomb under everyone's arse. I feel something quite different, I have a sense of equilibrium, of harmony, I love my fellow diners. Now this is very unusual for me. Normally I feel—as I've just said—absoute malice and hatred towards everyone within spitting distance—but here I feel love. How do you explain it?
SUKI It's the ambience. (370–71)
Lambert and Matt are distantly reminiscent of Gus and Ben from The Dumb Waiter; but distinctly less polite while living much higher on the hog. One imagines such characters
"strategically" plotting the "peaceful" rendition of others without any qualms while sipping Perrier
Perrier
Perrier is a brand of bottled mineral water made from a spring in Vergèze in the Gard département of France. The spring is naturally carbonated...
and simultaneously planning their next wedding-anniversary dinner celebration (perhaps with a different set of wives) on their mobiles
Mobile phone
A mobile phone is a device which can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile network operator...
.
As the Waiter says in his apparently penultimate "interjection", in which one might detect intimations of mortality:
My grandfather introduced me to the mystery of life and I'm still in the middle of it. I can't find the door to get out. My grandfather got out of it. He left it behind him and he didn't look back.
He got that absolutely right.
And I'd like to make one further interjection.
He stands still.
Slow fade.
(385)
"Apart From That" (Sketch) (2006)
Pinter mocks mobile phone
Mobile phone
A mobile phone is a device which can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile network operator...
s comically in an ostensibly-trivial wireless conversation, while still suggesting a residual bit of menace in the unsaid, developed as his last revue sketch Apart From That (2006). As Billington observes, this dramatic sketch inspired by Pinter's strong aversion to mobile phones is "very funny", but "as two people trade banalities over their mobile phones[,] there is a hint of something ominous and unspoken behind the clichéd chat" (429), as illustrated in the following excerpt:
Two people on mobile phones.
GENE.
How are you?
LAKE.
Very well. And you? Are you well?
GENE.
I'm terribly well. How about you?
LAKE.
Really well. I'm really well.
GENE.
I'm so glad.
LAKE.
Apart from ... oh you know ...
GENE.
I know.
LAKE.
Apart from ... oh you know ...
GENE.
I do know. But apart from that ...?
LAKE.
How about you?
GENE.
Oh you know ... all things considered ...
LAKE.
I know. But apart from that ...?
Silence.
GENE.
Sorry. I've lost you.
[....]
("Apart From That" 5–6)
See also
- Comedy of mannersComedy of mannersThe comedy of manners is a genre of play/television/film which satirizes the manners and affectations of a social class, often represented by stock characters, such as the miles gloriosus in ancient times, the fop and the rake during the Restoration, or an old person pretending to be young...
- Film noirFilm noirFilm noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...
- GrotesqueGrotesqueThe word grotesque comes from the same Latin root as "Grotto", meaning a small cave or hollow. The original meaning was restricted to an extravagant style of Ancient Roman decorative art rediscovered and then copied in Rome at the end of the 15th century...
- Kafkaesque
- Music hallMusic hallMusic Hall is a type of British theatrical entertainment which was popular between 1850 and 1960. The term can refer to:# A particular form of variety entertainment involving a mixture of popular song, comedy and speciality acts...
- Theatre of the AbsurdTheatre of the AbsurdThe Theatre of the Absurd is a designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction, written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, as well as to the style of theatre which has evolved from their work...
- VaudevilleVaudevilleVaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...
Works cited
- Billington, MichaelMichael Billington (critic)Michael Keith Billington is a British author and arts critic. Drama critic of The Guardian since October 1971, he is "Britain's longest-serving theatre critic" and the author of biographical and critical studies relating to British theatre and the arts; most notably, he is the authorised...
. Harold Pinter. 1996. Rev. ed. London: Faber and FaberFaber and FaberFaber and Faber Limited, often abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in the UK, notable in particular for publishing a great deal of poetry and for its former editor T. S. Eliot. Faber has a rich tradition of publishing a wide range of fiction, non fiction, drama, film and music...
, 2007. ISBN 9780571234769 (13). [Updated 2nd ed. of The Life and Work of Harold Pinter. 1996. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. ISBN 0571171036 (10).]
- Gussow, MelMel GussowMelvyn H. Gussow was an American theater critic, movie critic, and author who wrote for The New York Times for 35 years.-Biography:...
. Conversations with Pinter. London: Nick Hern BooksNick Hern BooksNick Hern Books is a London-based independent specialist publisher of plays, theatre books and screenplays. The company was founded by the former Methuen drama editor Nick Hern in 1988.-History:...
, 1994. ISBN 1854592017. Rpt. New York: LimelightLimelightLimelight is a type of stage lighting once used in theatres and music halls. An intense illumination is created when an oxyhydrogen flame is directed at a cylinder of quicklime , which can be heated to 2572 °C before melting. The light is produced by a combination of incandescence and...
, 2004. ISBN 0879101792.
- Jones, DavidDavid Jones (director)David Hugh Jones was a British stage, television, and film director.-Personal history:Jones was born in Poole, Dorset, the son of John David Jones and his wife Gwendolen Agnes Langworthy...
. "Travels with Harold". Front & Center Online ("The Online Version of Roundabout Theatre CompanyRoundabout Theatre CompanyThe Roundabout Theatre Company is a leading non-profit theatre company based in New York City.-History:The company was founded in 1965 by Gene Feist and Elizabeth Owens and now operates five theatres, all in Manhattan: the American Airlines Theatre ; Studio 54 ; the Stephen Sondheim Theatre The...
's Subscriber Magazine"). Roundabout Theatre Company, Fall 2003. (3 pages.) WebWorld Wide WebThe World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
. 9 Oct. 2007.
- Merritt, Susan Hollis. Pinter in Play: Critical Strategies and the Plays of Harold Pinter. 1990. Rpt. with a new preface. Durham and London: Duke UPDuke University PressDuke University Press is an academic publisher of books and journals, and a unit of Duke University. It publishes approximately 120 books annually and more than 40 journals, as well as offering five electronic collections...
, 1995. ISBN 0822316749 (10). ISBN 9780822316749 (13).
- Pinter, HaroldHarold PinterHarold Pinter, CH, CBE was a Nobel Prize–winning English playwright and screenwriter. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party , The Homecoming , and Betrayal , each of which he adapted to...
. "Apart From That". Areté 20 (Spring/Summer 2006): 5–8.
- –––. The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, and Celebration. In The Essential Pinter. New York: Grove PressGrove PressGrove Press is an American publishing imprint that was founded in 1951. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it into an alternative book press in the United States. The Atlantic Monthly Press, under the aegis of its...
, 2006. ISBN 0802142699 (10). ISBN 9780802142696. (Parenthetical references to this edition of the three plays appear in the text.)
- –––. The Caretaker and The Dumb Waiter: Two Plays by Harold Pinter. 1960. New York: Grove PressGrove PressGrove Press is an American publishing imprint that was founded in 1951. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it into an alternative book press in the United States. The Atlantic Monthly Press, under the aegis of its...
, 1988. ISBN 080215087x (10). ISBN 9780802150875 (13). (Parenthetical citations to The Dumb Waiter in the text are from this ed. of the play, which is accessible online via Google Books "limited preview". [It was reissued again with a new cover after Pinter won the 2005 Nobel Prize in LiteratureNobel Prize in LiteratureSince 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
.)
- Wardle, IrvingIrving WardleJohn Irving Wardle is an English writer and theatre critic.He was born on 20 July 1929 in Manchester, Lancashire, the son of John Wardle and his wife Nellie . His father was drama critic on the Bolton Evening News, and a regular performer at the Bolton Little Theatre...
. "The Birthday Party". Encore 5 (July–Aug. 1958): 39–40. Rpt. in The Encore Reader: A Chronicle of the New Drama. Ed. Charles MarowitzCharles MarowitzCharles Marowitz is an American critic, theatre director, and playwright who has been a regular columnist on Swans Commentary—a cultural-political bi-weekly—since 2004...
, Tom Milne, and Owen Hale. London: Methuen, 1965. 76–78. (Reissued as: New Theatre Voices of the Fifties and Sixties. London: Eyre Methuen, 1981.)
- –––. "Comedy of Menace". Encore 5 (Sept. – Oct. 1958): 28–33. Rpt. in The Encore Reader and New Theatre Voices 86–91.
- –––. "There's Music in That Room". Encore 7 (July–Aug. 1960): 32–34. Rpt. in The Encore Reader and New Theatre Voices 129–32.
External links
- "Plays by Harold Pinter" at HaroldPinter.org: The Official Website of the International Playwright Harold Pinter (Index of Harold Pinter's plays; includes dates of composition and productions).