Comedy Of Menace Research Articles

An Interpretation of The Dumb Waiter from Foucault’s Disciplinary Power Theory

Harold Pinter is one of Britian’s greatest playwrights in the 20th century. He is famous for his “Comedy of Menace” which discloses the menace theme in people’s daily life and the power discipline and resistance behind the great menace. In the one-act play The Dumb Waiter, the subtle power struggles are revealed through the closed space, absurd dialogues and repetitive actions. Michel Foucault, one of the greatest French philosophies, points out that power occurs everywhere and it is related to body, knowledge and discourse. Thus this thesis attempts to explore the discipline punishment and resistance in the power struggle in The Dumb Waiter, and then reveal the plight of human being in the 20th century.

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

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.

The Dwarfs

The Dwarfs

Harold Pinter’s the Caretaker as an absurd play and the view on life in Srimad Bhagavad Gita

This study presents the absurdity of life in The Caretaker by Harold Pinter. His comedies are known as the comedies of menace. He has viewed that he had not composed those plays with a particular purpose and philosophy. His characters are filled with vitality in his plays. He rejected the naturalistic tradition of Henrik Ibsen. Srimad Bhagavad Gita reveals that the making of the world is perishable. Man’s body is made of five elements; earth, water, air, fire, and sky.

‘Homecoming’: A Pinteresque Parable of Lost and Found

Pinter, the synonym for culture shock, is one of the prominent figures of the school that eventually matured up to become the Absurdist Theatre. Harold Pinter, the British playwright had a fifty- years long writing career, highly productive and significant as well. The equations of personal, family, social relationships are shattered or rather defined from a new perspective. Pinter’s debut play The Room gave way to the term ‘comedy of menace’, where a ‘one- person dialogue’ (rather than monologue) is the only format. Homecoming, a two-act play, won the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play. The play as claimed by critics, is a metaphor of the true meaning and feel of Home and finding one. ‘Pinteresque’ is the term which was invented to define the genre that Harold Pinter’s play fall in as it was not I accordance with the formulaic scale. Evoking the truth, without decoration, devoid of any fake positivity or morality. He says it with words, he can tell it without words as well, with ‘silence’ at the right spot. Pinter owes a lot to Beckett theme-wise and style- wise. Beckett’s world is one of problems without solutions, bare reality and the inadequacy of words for expressing the emotions. The present paper is an effort to dive deep into the ‘Pinteresque’ portion of the Absurdist world and ponder over his style and thematic expression with special reference to the play The Homecoming.

파놉티콘 감시와 정치적 주체되기의 영화적 재현

This paper examines Pinter’s cinematic techniques in his modifications of Kafka’s original novel for the purpose of cinematic transliterations of the elements in his comedies of menace and political plays by analyzing his screenplay, The Trial. Pinter modifies and intensifies Kafka’s political elements by integrating his theatrical politics into cinematic politics. Pinter finds out the common concerns and themes in Kafka’s novel and modifies and reterritorializes the irrationality of law system, pervasiveness of authority, and panoptical surveillance into film media. Pinter presents the lines of flight for becoming a political subject inducing audiences to face up to the menacing reality and real panoptical surveillance.

Punch Lines, Punching Bags, and Mr. Punch

Abstract The red-capped, hook-nosed, serial killer Mr. Punch, a descendent of the Italian Pulcinella of the commedia dell’arte, belongs to the tradition of “bad” clowns—those tricksters who have populated the myths and folktales of cultures the world over for millennia. This article compares Punch’s disturbing antics to those of Pinter’s clowns who populate his short, political plays, One for the Road, The New World Order, Mountain Language and his lately discovered sketch The Pres and an Officer. Although much has been written about Pinter’s “comedy of menace,” this article offers a new perspective, exploring the comic contrivances that are endemic to both a Punch and Judy Show and Pinter’s depiction of state-sanctioned brutality, and how Pinter exploits the comic to underscore his political message.

Cringe Histories: Harold Pinter and the Steptoes

This article argues that cringe humour in British television had begun at least by the early 1960s and derived from a theatre history in which conventions of Naturalism were modified by emergent British writers working with European avant-garde motifs. The article makes the case by analysing the importance of cringe to the BBC sitcom Steptoe and Son, tracing its form and themes back to the ‘comedy of menace’ and ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ emblematised by the early work of playwright Harold Pinter. The article links the play that made Pinter’s reputation, The Birthday Party, to dramatic tropes and social commentary identified in Steptoe and Son and in other British sitcoms with cringe elements. The analysis not only discusses relationships between the different dramatic works on stage and screen but also pursues some of the other connections between sitcom and Pinter’s drama via networks of actors and contemporaneous discourses of critical commentary. It assesses the political stakes of cringe as a comic form, particularly the failure of cringe to impel political activism, and places this in the context of the repeated broadcast of Pinter’s plays and episodes of Steptoe and Son over an extended period.

핀터의 The Dwarfs의 각색을 통한 다시-보기

This paper attempts an intertextual and intermedial reading of adaptation texts of Pinter’s The Dwarfs, as a series of re-visions in terms of adaptation studies. His first and semi-autobiographical novel has initiated his own adaptations for his radio (1960) and stage play (1963) before publishing its adaptive version (1990) and then Krabbe’s adaptations for his unfilmed film script (1996), his revised play and film versions (2002), and his another play version (2003). The reading of adaptation texts of The Dwarfs offers a re-vision of hegemonic criticisms on Pinter’s accomplishments as a political dramatist and a cryptic feminist, that is, an act of looking back on his writings based on the interrelationship between his politics and sexual politics, from a new critical direction.<BR> This paper demonstrates the adapters’s political and sexual political motivations in inscribing differences in the original and previous texts for their new versions. Pinter’s excluding Virginia, the major female character of the novel for an all-male play shows his intention to create a new genre of political play, comedy of menace, as a political metaphor to appropriate sexual politics. His retrieving Virginia out of the outer darkness in the published novel also proves that his political plays are structured in-between of politics and sexual politics. By presenting his male characters as gendered beings in terms of the hegemonic masculinity and his female character as a precursor of his strong women who can exercise subversive sexual politics in his political plays, he proves that he has been insistently concerned with gender issues as a cryptic feminist. This intertextual reading of various versions of The Dwarfs offers an approach toward Pinter’s new creative space expanded by persistent re-visions.

Комедия угроз как тип абсурдистского дискурса (Д. Кэмптон, Г. Пинтер, Д. Данилов)

Комедия угроз как тип абсурдистского дискурса (Д. Кэмптон, Г. Пинтер, Д. Данилов)

The Linguistic Functions and Educational Implications of Silence in Pinter's The Dumb Waiter

Though silence means a complete absence of audible sound, it is in no way related to absolute lack of communication. While speaking, people put smaller boundaries in between small chunks of their talk in an attempt to follow up larger ones. They could be among syllables, words, or elements in terms of phonology, semantics, or syntax respectively, with the goal of maintaining some social relations, in terms of pragma- linguistics. Even in written texts, particularly in those of drama, silence can be employed to some extent in a way that necessitates a kind of investigation. Silence, then, seems to be a meaningful tool whether it is used within the verbal communication or in the absence of speech in non-verbal communication. Hence, the present study aims at investigating the communicative functions of silence in Pinter's The Dumb Waiter, and showing the meanings of silence whether verbally or non-verbally used. Further, by using Jaworski's (2006) model of silence functions, it inspects the applicability of the three major language functions, ideational, interpersonal and textual, to silence as a tool for communication. It is, accordingly, hypothesized that Pinter employs the three functions in his play; the most employed function of them is the interpersonal. Silence, in addition, is used to reflect the ‘power’ of one character over the others and identifies the ‘distance’ between them. Thus, the comedy of menace, as Pinter calls it, is constructed. The study has, eventually, proved that silence has the same significance and functions of language. It has also concluded that investigating silence in literature, specifically in drama, adds very much to the interpretation, understanding, and the teaching of it.

Doğum Günü Partisi: Bir pinter modeli absürt tiyatro

Utilizing reasonable components in his plays, Pinter’s dialect is not confusing or surprising, but genuine-because of its unadulterated English dialect. The Birthday Party is Pinter’s second full-length play and one of the most celebrated plays categorized under the title of the Theater of Absurd. This masterpiece follows the dilemma in the dialogue between the main characters. Meg, Petey, and Stanley demonstrate the preposterousness with the embodiment of human identity under practical components, such as goodness. The play’s central theme is loneliness and explains the story of the reborn man who realizes that his life cannot continue in the boarding house. The Birthday Party is outfitted with all the sensible components of an impeccable diversion; genuine characters with genuine sentiments, unpretentious dangers, ghastliness fulfilled with an inevitable setting that accentuates to blend of the real world and drivel. In The Birthday Party, the solidarity in the real world is clearly described, and the absurdity of social status by the real characters is uncovered. The threats of exploiting the hearts and minds of postwar individuals have shocked them both physically and mentally. Individuals did not want to be exposed to the outside world while they were afraid of strangers in society. To be amusing, the play coasts the title of Men’s Comedy of Menace while battling with the genuine risk of exploring the focal character.

Comedy of Menace in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party Instructor: Basaad Maher Mhayyal

Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1957) clearly portrays the condition of modern man where there is a real communication failure among the characters. Through this play, Pinter tries his best to reflect this fact. He uses a lot of pauses and silences, i.e., the usage of language is no more significant to modern man. Pinter considers silence to be more powerful than the words themselves. That’s why long and short pauses can be seen throughout all Pinter’s plays. Modern man has been living in a state of alienation. All the characters are isolated by their own desire not to communicate with each other and to lock themselves away from the world. They are unable to express their feelings. Therefore modern man has buried himself in life just like the character of )Stanley( in this play who has buried himself in the boarding house in an attempt to be away from his own society after being rejected as a pianist by the people of that society. The play deals with human deterioration and the process of death. The disaster in the play does not lie in the idea of death, but in the more terrible state of being dead in life, as in )Stanley(’s case, who hides himself in a room ceasing all his relationships with life outside. This paper deals with Harold Pinter as a well-known British playwright who has his own unique style that is called Pinteresque, his language, and how he uses silences and pauses in his play The Birthday Party. It consists of an abstract, Pinter’s comedy of menace, his play The Birthday Party, and a conclusion

Masters (and Mistresses) of Menace

AbstractIn Harold Pinter’s last completed project before his death, a screen adaptation of Anthony Shaffer’s playSleuth(1970), a large publicity poster dominates the study of crime novelist Andrew Wyke, describing him as ‘the master of menace.’ This is also a self-referential joke directed at Pinter’s association with ‘comedies of menace,’ such asA Slight Ache(1957) andThe Birthday Party(1958), that succeeded in creating feelings of unease and discomfort in ways that had not been seen in the theatre before.As a repertory actor before he became a dramatist, Pinter was likely to have encountered the fears and insecurities that theatre can create, and these perhaps return in the sinister environments that we find in his early plays. In turn, the queasiness and growing unease we encounter in Pinter’s drama has been appropriated by other ‘childe Harolds’ including Philip Ridley, Anthony Neilson, Martin Crimp, and Jez Butterworth, whose work follows variations of the Pinteresque. This article looks at some of the ways these dramatists have developed on from Pinter’s template of creating a sense of unease, yet at the same time these dramatists show an awareness of how the nature of fear has radically altered since the turn of the millennium. Signs of this change can also be found in Pinter’s work from the 1980 s: whereas previously fear had been vague in its aetiology, now it came out of the shadows to be named: Pinter’s ‘comedies of menace’ gave way to plays about torture by repressive political regimes inParty Time(1991) and memories of the Holocaust inAshes to Ashes(1997).Since then the depiction of states of fear have forked off on two separate paths: latter day ‘childe Harolds’ such as Philip Ridley continue to promote what he has called ‘theatre as a ghost train,’ a place of disorientation designed to induce fear for its own sake, while a larger contingent that include Simon Stephens, Duncan Macmillan, Mike Bartlett, Martin Crimp, and Mark Ravenhill also make fears manifest: these include terrorism and the ensuing War on Terror, the Anthropocene and climate change and the precarity and repression of neo-liberal economies and the alienation of self-hood through technology.

Cinematic Politics in Pinter’s Screenplays

This paper examines Pinter’s cinematic politics in his early screenplay The Servant and later screenplay The Trial. Harold Pinter is a political playwright of a kind as he himself answered the question of his politics. He expressed his indirect dramatic politics metaphorically in his early plays classified as comedy of menace, presenting the theme of dominance and subservience and the symbolic aspects of the key concept room and the conflict between its occupant and invader. In addition, he revealed direct dramatic politics in his later political plays exposing irrationalities of reality and the unjustifiable political questions of society, despotic states, or organizations. Similarly, Pinter’s early screenplay The Servant includes the indirect and metaphorical politics of his early plays, and his later screenplay The Trial deals with the direct politics of his later political plays. This paper focuses on how Pinter transformed dramatic politics into his screenplays by modifying original novels.

Memory: The Means of Psychological Domination—A Study of Harold Pinter’s Old Times

&lt;p&gt;In the late 1960s and early 1970s, with his memory plays Harold Pinter staged his own aesthetic revolution by breaking out of the traps represented by the Comedies of Menace. Pinter, as Noël Coward said, is a genuine original and a superb craftsman. In &lt;em&gt;Old Times&lt;/em&gt;, he drastically breaks our traditional understanding of “time” and “memory”, endowing memory with a special quality. It becomes a net which can be weaved randomly. From the perspective of spatial theory, the paper aims at analyzing the temporal characteristics and spatial characteristics of &lt;em&gt;Old Times &lt;/em&gt;and exploring the inner world of modern people. It comes to a conclusion that characters create the past story according to their psychological or tactical needs of the moment; in other words, memory is the means of psychological domination. The play also intends to reveal something universal: the sense of crisis and loneliness. Deeley and Anna trap themselves in power struggle because they see each other as a threat to their relationship with Kate. So it suggests that each man is an island.&lt;/p&gt;

Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter in German: What’s Missing in Translation?

Several of Harold Pinter’s works have been adapted as screenplays and filmed. This paper investigates director Robert Altman’s TV movie The Dumb Waiter in comparison with the German dubbed version, Der stumme Diener, as well as the reception of Pinter’s play in German. The translation of Pinter’s dialogue into German involves stylistic aspects, such as Pinter’s dry, concise style, as well as the subliminal wit, sarcasm and irony. Humour is particularly difficult to translate, often involving compensation or transfer from one (cultural) context to another. As one of the “comedies of menace”, The Dumb Waiter employs black humour and ironic wit to create threat and dramatic tension. The unknown threat is counterbalanced by “black comic relief”. The lack of a classical German tradition of black comedy problematizes the translation of Pinter’s dialogue, while the limits of audiovisual translation add additional hurdles.

Art Truth &amp; Politics: Excerpts from the 2005 Nobel Lecture

Drawing by Maria Johnson Harold Pinter is generally regarded as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the twentieth century. That he occupies a position as a modern classic is illustrated by his name entering the language as an adjective used to describe a particular atmosphere and environment in drama: Pinteresque. Pinter restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of one another and pretense crumbles. With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution. Pinter's drama was first perceived as a variation of absurd theater but has later more aptly been characterized as comedy of menace, a genre in which the writer allows us to eavesdrop on the play of domination and submission hidden in the most mundane of conversations. In a typical Pinter play, we meet people defending themselves against intrusion or their own impulses by entrenching themselves in a reduced and controlled existence. Another principal theme is the volatility and elusiveness of the past. Harold Pinter was born on October 10, 1930, in the London borough of Hackney, son of a Jewish dressmaker. After being evacuated from London during World War n, he attended Hackney Grammar School, where he played Macbeth and Romeo in productions directed by Joseph Brearley. Deciding to choose a career in acting, in 1948 he was accepted at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and in 1951 enrolled at the Central School of Speech and Drama. That same year, he won a place in Anew McMaster's famous Irish repertory company, renowned for its performances of Shakespeare. Pinter toured again between 1954 and 1957, using the stage name of David Baron. After publishing his first poems in 1950, Pinter made his playwriting debut in 1957 with The Room, presented in Bristol. Other early plays were The Birthday Party (1957), at first a fiasco of legendary dimensions but later one of his most performed plays, and The Dumb Waiter (1957). His conclusive breakthrough came with The Caretaker (1959), followed by The Homecoming (1964) and other plays. Many critics have divided Pinter's drama into an initial period of psychological realism; a second, more lyrical phase featuring such plays as Landscape (1967) and Silence (1968); and finally a third, political phase in One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), The New World Order (1991), and other plays. But this division into periods seems oversimplified and ignores some of his strongest writing, such as No Man's Land (1974) and Ashes to Ashes (1996). In fact, the continuity in his work is remarkable, and his political themes can be seen as a development of the early Pinter's analyzing of threat and injustice. Since 1973, Pinter has won recognition as a defender of human rights alongside his writing, often taking stands seen as controversial. Pinter has also written radio plays and screenplays for film and television. Among his best-known screenplays are those for The Servant (1963), The Accident (1967), The Go-between (1971) and The Trench Lieutenant's Woman (1981, based on the John Fowles novel). Pinter has also made a pioneering contribution as a director. [Courtesy of the Swedish Academy]

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

One for the Road, Mountain Language and the Impasse of Politics MARC SILVERSTEIN Onefor the Road (1984) and Moulltain 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 ofhis [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. To phrase this last point somewhat differently: at the center of Pinter's work lies a concern with the nature, operation and structures ofpower that inform the cultural order. Certainly, we may not initially sense anything startlingly new in the claim that Pinter'S plays revolve around questions of power - Burkman, Esslin, Gabbard, Gale, and Quigley are only some of the critics who have directed attention to the battles for power that form the nucleus of Pinter's dramatic action. What has not received sufficient attention, however, is the political dimension of these battles, a dimension arising from how Pinter conceptualizes power rather than a quality that inheres in power itself. To perceive the political resonance of such battles for position. we must recognize that we cannot divorce these battles from the cultural space in which they are fought; that we are not dealing with contests for personal power (a phrase that, as I will argue, has no meaning within Pinter's dramatic universe); that the (1991) 34 MODERN DRAMA 422 One for the Road and Mountain Language 423 integrity of the cultural order itself becomes the stakes in the power games and struggles for authority Pinter dramatizes. To elucidate these claims and identify the precise nature of Pinter's political vision, I want first to tum briefly to his two earliest and most " absurdist" plays before discussing how this vision informs the analysis ofstate power in Onefor the Road and Mountain Longuage. The Room was the first of Pinter's plays to receive the designation " comedy of menace," and critics ofthe play generally agree that this sense of menace finds its locus in the enigmatic figure of Riley. As a Negro who bears an Irish name, Riley embodies two levels of otherness and cultural marginality. At the same time, however, arriving at Rose's flat to call her home, speaking quite literally in the narne-of-the-Father, he occupies the subject position ofwhat Lacan terms the (symbolic) father, the privileged site ofthe Word-as-Law within the cultural order. What is perhaps most significant about how Pinter depicts Riley is the lack of perceived tension or contradiction between his ethnic otherness and the position of cultural centrality from which he speaks. Indeed, if Pinter's stage directions did not repeatedly refer to him as "the Negro," the play would contain no textual indication of his "otherness," since the dialogue never directly refers to it. If the play renders Riley's ethnicity virtually invisible, we may well ask why Pinter does identify him as a Negro. I would argue that one answer to this question lies precisely in his invisibility. The power that speaks through Riley erases cultural difference through an inexorable logic ofthe same, allowing difference to (mis)recognize itself by identifying with an image of cultural centrality. Rather than resort to marginalization or repression to neutralize the threat of otherness, the cultural power for which Riley serves as " mouthpiece'" (re)creates the other in the image of its values, allowing the otherto speak its Janguage, desire its desires...

The Role of the "Guardians" in T.S. Eliot's Cocktail Party

When T.S. Eliot's Cocktail Party had its world premiere at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949, the audience was not only deeply impressed with the play, but obviously also deeply puzzled. On 24 August 1949 the Scotsman commented: "it [The Cocktail Party] is bound to be some kind of message to humanity." Yet it could not be stated precisely what the message was about. And after more than thirty years The Cocktail Party still contains some of the enigmas which at that time confused even the most sophisticated critics. In the meantime the European drama has, of course, seen a number of various new theatrical currents: the "Theatre of Despair," a worldwide reception of the plays of Bertolt Brecht, the "New Wave" and the "Second Wave" in the British theatre, the renaissance of the history play, the "Theatre of Cruelty," the "Comedy of Menace," the "Theatre of the Absurd" and the new documentary, to mention only the most important. With the plays of Beckett and Ionesco, however, literature in general seemed to have reached a kind of spiritual dead end. In attempting to find a way out, playwrights tended to employ magic and the occult, striving to restore the original density and strangeness of the world. Looking back now, one realizes that the craving for the more mysterious aspects of reality seems to have been anticipated in Eliot's Cocktail Party with its strong emphasis on ritual magic.