Harold Pinter’s Plays in my Mind
I'll never forget my first impressions of The Room. Absurd! The whole play is patently absurd! The characters, plots, dialogue, even the spectacles are absurd. I read the play over and over, trying hard to understand what the playwright was driving at but in vain. But oddly enough, those sensations are almost pleasant. It is really a magic play. I had sunk to the depths of addiction. I asked myself several times, “Why do these simple words have such power?” The answer is still unknown.
The play written by the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter opens with Rose having a \"one-person dialog\" with her husband Bert, who remains silent throughout the whole scene, while serving him a breakfast fry-up, although the scene appears to occur around evening. Rose talks mostly about the cold weather and keeps comparing the cosy, warm room to the dark, damp basement and to the cold weather outside. She creates a sense of uneasiness by the way she talks and acts, always moving from one place to another in the room, even while sitting, she sits in a rocking chair and rocks. Her speech is filled with many quick subject changes and asks her husband questions, yet answers them herself.
With a few knocks and a permission to enter, Mr. Kidd, the old landlord, enters. The dialog between Rose and Mr. Kidd consists of many subjects that change very frequently, at times each one of them talks about something different and it seems they are avoiding subjects and aren't listening to each other, creating an irrational dialog.
A blind black man, named Riley, who has purportedly been waiting in the basement, suddenly arrives upstairs to her room, to deliver a mysterious message to Rose from her \"father\". The play ends violently when Bert, returns, finds Rose stroking Riley's face, delivers a long sexually-suggestive monologue about his experience driving his van while referring to it as if it was a woman, and then beats Riley until he appears lifeless, possibly murdering him, after which Rose cries \"Can't see. I can't see. I can't see\".
The Room is Harold Pinter's first play, written and first produced in 1957. Considered by critics the earliest example of Pinter's \"comedy of menace\including dialogue that is comically familiar and yet disturbingly unfamiliar, simultaneously or alternatingly both mundane and frightening; subtle yet contradictory and ambiguous characterizations; a comic yet menacing mood characteristic of mid-twentieth-century English tragicomedy; a plot featuring reversals and surprises that can be both funny and emotionally moving; and an unconventional ending that leaves at least some questions unresolved.
Critic Irving Wardle used the term, “Comedies of Menace” to describe Pinter’s dramatic work. The plays are fueled by intense dialogue that seems disconnected from any sort of exposition. The audience rarely knows the background of the characters. They don’t even know if the characters are telling the truth. Pinter further explains: Two people in a room. I am dealing a great deal of the time with this image of two people in a room. The curtain goes up on stage and I see it as a very potent question: What is going on between two people in the room? Is someone going to open the door and come in? ---obviously they are
scared of what is outside the room. Outside the room there is a world bearing upon them which is frightening. I am sure it is frightening to you and me as well.
I once read an article about the best, most famous plays by Harold Pinter written by Wade Bradford, an excellent drama expert. He noted, “The audience leaves bewildered with a queasy feeling – an uneasy sensation, as though you were supposed to do something terribly important, but you can’t remember what it was. You leave the theater a bit disturbed, a bit excited, and more than bit unbalanced. And that’s just the way Harold Pinter wanted you to feel.”
I'm definitely interested in reading Pinter’s brilliant plays. I’ll have further exploration of Pinter’s The Birthday Party, The Dumbwaiter, The Caretaker, The Homecoming and Old Times in my free time.
2014105000 14级英语教育独秀班 李良乐
