Strategizing Pinter and Bond

Abstract

dward Bond and Harold Pinter came of age in same theatrical generation, part of explosion of new drama that followed in wake of Berliner Ensemble's 1956 London tour, of John Osborne's celebrated Look Back in Anger (1956) and The Entertainer (1957), of development of new playwrights at Royal Court, of state and local subsidies that made theater one of Britain's most visible (and exportable) cultural commodities in postwar period. In many ways, of course, it's hard to imagine two more different contemporaries-in their choice of subject matter, in dramatic style, and, finally, in their divergent investments in politics of art. Yet in some ways their work is traced by history they share. The metaphysical menace that early audiences found in plays like The Birthday Party and The Caretaker is matched in Bond's writing by a menace (in Saved and The Pope's Wedding) no less disorienting for being grounded in pathologies of urban class structure. And while Bond's more evidently didactic drama has frequently edged into terrain of political allegory (in The War Plays, for instance), in plays like One for Road and Mountain Language Pinter has retooled parabolic discourse of the absurd as an instrument of political drama.