Pinter has said that his main concern when writing a
play is with structure, yet published criticism has so far paid
little attention to this aspect of his craft. This study,
therefore, examines the structures of Pinter's stage plays.
The method followed is a chronological structural analysis
moving from The Room through The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter,
The Caretaker, The Homecoming, Landscape and Silence to his
latest play, Old Times, first produced in London on June 1, 1971- The opening chapter discusses the terms which form a
background to the subsequent description of the dramatic
structures. The analyses demonstrate that there are at least
three major features of his craftsmanship to emerge at this
point in his career. The first is that where as the stage plays
up to the writing of Landscape share a common, almost traditionally sequential narrative structure, the three latest plays,
Landscape, Silence and Old Times, have differently shaped
structures relying heavily on the exploration of memory and
abandoning a normal sequential ordering of incident. This
marked change implies a different use of time which is the
second major feature, and is a consequence of the exploration
of the past. It is accompanied in Landscape and Silence by a
shift from dialogue in the previous plays to an almost exclusive reliance on monologue. Pinter also moves from his earlier comic-grotesque manner to a cooler, more subdued mode which uses lyrical and elegiac language. The third major feature of his craftsmanship is a certain rhythm of structure. This is
a tendency to elaborate a one-act form into a larger structure,
and then to take some feature or concern from previous work,
paring down and compressing to make another one-act play,
before building up and elaborating once more. Thus The Room
is followed by the larger, three act structure of The Birthday
Party to accommodate additional concerns. The Dumb Waiter
shows the paring down process before the structural expansion
in The Caretaker. The Homecoming, with its tighter two-act
structure, is centrally placed, looking back to previously
explored themes and anticipating the concern with memory in
the three latest works. In the one-act Landscape Pinter
abandons horizontal for vertical structure, explores cyclic
rather than sequential time and uses monologue rather than
dialogue. Silence illustrates a further paring down process
in its even more austere denial of theatricality before the
renewed building up process discernible in the two-act play,
Old Times. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/41892 |
| Date | January 1972 |
| Creators | Parkin, Christine Patricia |
| Publisher | University of British Columbia |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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