Metamimesis in Harold Pinter’s Old Times

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines Pinter’s Old Times (1971) to show how Pinter’s theatre, like his political thought, reveals the mimetic spell working on the audience of a play even when they are fully under its influence. A distinction between theatre as a strictly mimetic practice and theatre as a means to clarify the role mimesis plays in social life more generally—what I call metamimetic theatre—becomes crucial to understanding not just the political stance Pinter lays out in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, but the treatment of power in his artistic work as well. In fleshing out the concept of metamimesis as it operates within Old Times, I draw on the mimetic theory of René Girard and on recent Pinter scholarship to identify a set of attributes exemplifying Pinter’s metamimetic technique, including radical uncertainty with respect to character motivation, triangular power dynamics, and the use of characters embodying connective difference. The metamimetic aspect of Pinter’s work underscores its ongoing relevance to a contemporary world made dangerous by the intensifying mimetic competition of social media.