Editor's Note

Abstract

Silence.Pause.Pause.Silence. A Pinter play? Perhaps, but I use the Pinteresque stage directions here to describe the publication history of the journal associated with the International Harold Pinter Society. Established in the late 1980s, the Society published The Pinter Review for many years under the editorial leadership of professors Frank Gillen (University of Tampa) and Steven Gale (Kentucky State University) through the University of Tampa Press. When that funding ceased, the Society continued to take robust part in Pinter panels through the MLA and MMLA, but the journal languished. Thanks to Pennsylvania State University Press and funding from the University of Louisville, the journal has not only revived itself, but it has also broadened its scope as The Pinter Review: Essays on Contemporary Drama.While The Review is still the official academic journal of the International Harold Pinter Society, it has committed itself to publishing peer-reviewed essays, reviews, interviews, and discussions that consider questions germane to a more diverse range of contemporary drama and dramatists and their contributions to various art forms. We hope that the expansion encourages greater participation in the study of Pinter and of contemporary drama more generally.The focus of this issue is a timely one. Essays address the representation, use, and effects of time in Pinter's work, and all agree that Pinteresque time is unusual, expansive, and provocative. Stephen Watt's essay argues that Pinter's references to world wars are not merely historical markers; they contribute to Pinter's “anxious temporality,” best defined by recent discussions of “total war.” Yoking Pinter's representation of time to his classic resistance to verifiability, Judith Roof examines the “unapprehendability of presence” in several Pinter works. Likewise, Craig Owens investigates presence, suggesting that it “destabilizes the ontological coherence of theatrical performance as such.” Mica Hilson argues that Pinter's representations of time, particularly the references to cruising time and bathing time, are examples of “queer time.” In a pugilistic vein, Susan Harris Smith looks at Pinter's deliberate “roughing up” of time to dispel any nostalgia for the past, while Katherine Burkman focuses on The Homecoming to illustrate Pinter's mythic and timeless quality. Reflecting on two different productions of Pinter's Betrayal, Russell Vandenbroucke ponders time's representation and passage. I investigate the time tsunami Deborah faces in A Kind of Alaska, and Laura Richardson analyzes the conflicting temporalities in The Comfort of Strangers. And no Pinter collection is complete without some reference to Beckett, so it is up to Lance Norman to establish the connection, by way of The Tailor of Panama, in his essay that examines the “fantasy of a forestalled autobiographical temporality” in Pinter's decision to play Krapp, sans banana, in Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. The volume concludes with timely and lively reviews.I hope you enjoy this new and improved journal. It's about time!