One for the Road, Mountain Language and the Impasse of Politics

Abstract

One for the Road (1984) and Mountain Language (1988), Harold Pinter's most recent works for the theatre, represent the dramatist's most overtly political work to date. Dramatizing and directly confronting the audience with the oppressive and authoritarian operations of state power, these dramas have been greeted by reviewers as signalling a shift in Pinter's writing from what Martin Esslin terms "the highly private world of his [earlier] plays" to a concern with charting the more public terrain of the political arena. It would be extremely reductionistic, however, to base a judgment of what constitutes political art solely on a consideration of manifest content. Examining Pinter's dramatic oeuvre from The Room (1957) through Mountain Language, we discover less an emphasis on that "highly private world" that Esslin posits as the defining characteristic of the "Theatre of the Absurd" than a focus on the mechanisms of domination and marginalization, the social construction of gender and sexuality, and the ideological status of such "state apparatus" as the family a focus, in other words, on fundamentally political issues.