Defamiliarizing Reality for Mental and Physical Subjection: Rereading Harold Pinter’s The Room and The Dumb Waiter as Political Comedies

Abstract

While Pinter's earliest plays have been recognized in the modernist history of theatre as comedies of menace and his later plays as political comedies, this article argues that his earliest plays are equally very liable to be interpreted as political comedies. Regardless of their absurdist dramatization of people's helpless exposure to external, unidentifiable threats, a common post-WWII characteristic feature of human experience, I claim that The Room and The Dumb Waiter (both written 1957, staged 1960), two model examples of Pinter's earliest oeuvres, do not simply follow the aesthetic of absurdist theatre to express human futility. The audience's experience of viewing the theatrical performances of both plays in terms of discursive cyclicality or character normality is subverted into one of changeability, strangeness, and contradiction. To foreground the political implications of such revolutionary theatrical experience, Pinter's plays are examined in the light of his unique use of defamiliarization, relying not on Brecht’s traditional techniques of singing, dancing, image-projecting, or captioning, but on a simple, dual technique of image destruction and creation. It consists of divesting characters of their normality and portraying them instead as individuals who identify only with unusual images of place, time, body, and consciousness. Using this special technique of defamiliarization, both plays are examined to reveal Pinter's central political theme of undermining reality for purposes of mental and physical subjections.