Un nuovo avvio nel teatro pinteriano: "Landscape" e "Silence"

 II
According to many criticals, we can rank Harold Pinter 
among the best dramatists of our time. 
     More or less influenced by the French Theatre of the 
Absurd, he gave  a great  breath of renewal to the British 
stage. The influence of Samuel Beckett on Pinter's choice 
of characters, dramatic language and elusive themes, was 
enormous.  
     By conventional standards, Beckett's plays are non-
plays or anti-plays because of the lack of a story or a plot. 
His characters often are nameless and their dialogue is 
almost non-existent. Beckett's main concern is to mirror 
the metaphysical anguish of the human being, aware of 
the absurdity of his own existence.  
     But, on the whole, Pinter's Absurdism differs from 
Beckett's. In most of Pinter's plays we can notice a 
meticulous mirroring  of reality and a precise social 
context. The author considers himself essentially a realist 
and his plays have plot, narration and characterization. It 
is precisely this realism, which is the first personal 
characteristic of originality in Pinter's writing. 
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     As a matter of fact, he refuses to give his audience all 
the relevant information or answers about the realistic  
situation presented on the stage. The author puts his 
characters on the stage without revealing anything to us 
about them and their former reality almost as if they were  
people casually met on the road. 
     So, Pinter's theatre is a sort of disclosure of human 
feelings, like man's loneliness, fear and incomprehension, 
from a psychological point of view. 
     In order to attain his aim, the author makes use of a 
particular dramatic setting and situation: a room endowed 
with a door which symbolically separates the inside from 
the outside world. Generally, the inside is warm and 
pleasant, while the outside is dark and dreadful. 
     Two or more characters move in this well defined 
space. Their love or familiar links are insubstantial and 
their dialogues are often trivial. A sense of unresolved 
anxiety, and at the same time the fear that someone could 
penetrate      the room through the door, terrorize the 
characters and contribute to create an atmosphere of 
menace. 
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     In spite of their apparent calm and balance, the      
characters' actions are directed by their obsessions. For 
this reason, the arrival of an intruder, generally coming 
from the outside world, will help them to expose their 
anguish.        
     Then, while the characters are concrete and realistic, 
their behaviour is mysterious and the menace is obscure 
and unspecified. As a consequence, ambiguity becomes an 
original element in pinter's dramatic tecnique. Actually, 
the element of Absurdity flows from Pinter's particular 
way of presenting his characters: creatures hovering 
between a physical dimension and a metaphysical one.       
     Apparently characters move within realistic situation 
and their dramatic language is that of everyday 
conversation. But, in Pinter's work, language has not 
"informative" function. Sometimes, the characters' 
speeches are only fragments that render the narration of 
the story    inconclusive.         
     Generally, Pinter's dramatic production is divided in 
three periods, each of them characterized by a dominant 
theme: first the room and the sense of menace; second 
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identity and the struggle for domination; third the 
relationship between past and  memory.  
     However this subdivision  cannot be taken as rigid.  
The three pairs of leading motifs are present in all Pinter's 
production, both theatre and cinema, while undergoing a 
process of variation. 
     This dissertation follows a thematic range that begins 
with the description of Pinter's first play, The Room, up to   
the last political ones. The aim of this choice is to show 
the presence of a leitmotiv in Pinter's work and its gradual 
evolution and variation in time.                   
     This leitmotiv has two aspects: first, the symbolic  
image of the room; second the presence of an intruder. 
These two themes are  also present in Pinter's screenplays 
as a further confirmation of  organic unity of the author's 
work. 
     At the end of the Sixties, however, Pinter started 
writing something quite different: here a new form  and a 
new thematic interest are mirrored in two plays whose 
titles are Landscape and Silence. 
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     The present work focuses on the analysis of both these 
plays that, among the remarkable set of Pinter's works 
represent a new departure.                                                                   
  This dissertation is divided in four chapters structured in 
the following way. 
     - CHAPTER ONE. It starts with an introductory 
paragraph that, after speaking of the innovations of 
modern theatre, introduces Harold Pinter, by emphasizing 
his originality among the Absurdists. 
     The second paragraph deals with the evolution of a 
unitary theme in all of Pinter's work, except for 
Landscape and Silence.  
     The image of the room and the struggle for domination 
against the intruder, are the central focus around which 
Pinter has created  his plays, from The Room (1957) to 
The Basement (1966),  passing through the screenplay of  
The Servant (1962) written for Joseph Losey. 
     After the parenthesis of Landscape and Silence (1968), 
Pinter came back to the usual scheme (intruder and 
struggle for possession) in Old Times (1970), up to the 
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last political plays, where the above mentioned themes 
will be present with a further variation:  totalitarianism.  
     The element of menace in Pinter's plays has different 
faces and a substantial nature. Usually,  the menace comes 
from the outside, as we can see in some plays like  The 
Room or  The Birthday Party. But in other plays, like The 
Dumb Waiter, the intruder is already present, or can be 
present in the psyche of the character, as happens to 
Edward in  A Slight Ache and to Len in  The Dwarfs. 
     In The aretaker, just as in Tea Party and The 
Homecoming, the intruder is received into the house, with 
open arms, by the characters themselves. In these three 
cases the result of this strategy is destructive of the 
physical and psychological safety of the characters. 
     Sometimes the respective positions of the intruder, on 
one hand, and the owner of the room, on the other, are 
reversed. For example, this happens to the male characters 
of  Night School and The Basement, who are dispossessed 
of their living space by the action of a stranger.  
     In three of the latest Pinter's plays, One For The Road, 
Mountain Language and Party Time, notwithstanding the 
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new political tone, the author continues developing his 
main purpose: the preoccupation about violence and 
menace mirrored in a totalitarian society. 
     The third paragraph presents a short analysis of two 
Pinter screenplays in order to underline the organic unity 
of Pinter's work, from a linguistic and thematic point of 
view.  
  The analysis of The Servant and The Accident confirms 
the strict link  between these works and the theatrical 
ones. 
     -CHAPTER TWO.  After writing a large number of 
plays about the sense of looming menace, Pinter went on 
to new thematic interests.  
     There were no longer all those doors that previously 
symbolised a menace from the outside world, nor     
intruders who destroyed the character's interior balance. 
Now Pinter proposed a study about the importance of 
memory and past reminiscences. 
     At the end of the Sixties, and after writing The 
Homecoming, the author announced his desire for 
something quite different, something with a lyrical and 
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nostalgic turning. It was from this personal intention that 
first Landscape and then Silence sprang up.  
     Chapter two deals with the analysis of Landscape        
and  is divided in three paragraphs.  
     The first explains the reason for Pinter's choice of a 
new departure in his theatre. At this point  it is very 
important to say that, notwithstanding the thematic 
innovation introduced  in Landscape, the author had no 
intention of abandoning  his previous  position  above all 
as regards dramatic structure. Once more, this choice 
attests to organic unity and, at the same time, the 
multiplicity of  Pinter's work.   
     As a matter of fact, memory and past reminiscences 
can be regarded as  a new weapon used by the author in 
order to continue his struggle against the absurdity and the 
anguish of the human condition.    
     The second paragraph dwells upon the structure of the 
theatrical work, analysing stage directions, scenario ( with 
its symbolic meaning), characters and their relationship.  
     Ample treatment is given to this last structural aspect 
because of its complexity. The relationship between the 
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two characters (Beth and her husband Duff), is based on 
elements of strong contrasts ( above all with reference to 
their different feelings), but also on elements of a  
universal    nature, like loneliness and love for animals.  
     The last paragraph confronts Landscape with Pinter's 
screenplay for The Go-Between. Taken from the novel 
written by L.P. Hartley, the screenplay develops the idea 
of the elusiveness of the past and its relation with present.  
     Even if  The Go-Between is closely linked to those 
plays that deal with the themes of memory and past 
events, it includes also other elements (the intruder) 
characteristic of Pinter's theatrical works.  
     There is a close similarity between Leo, the main 
character of The Go-Between, and Beth, the female 
character of Landscape. They are linked  together by the 
same desire: to live on one's memories. 
     -CHAPTER THREE. Together with chapter two, it 
represents  the central core of this dissertation.   
     Chapter three  deals with the analysis of  Silence, a 
one-act play staged in a double bill with its companion 
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piece Landscape, and continues the investigation into that 
thematic innovation  begun  in chapter two.                   
     Among Pinter's plays Silence is the most difficult to 
understand, because of its structural complexity which 
consists of  cross-cut monologues that are mostly 
flashbacks to the past.  
     There are three characters: a girl in her twenties and 
two men of different ages. They seem to live apart, each 
in his own room, only that  the room is not the traditional 
one. The scenario of this one-act play  is created by the 
author through an original dramatic tecnique: three 
separate areas on the stage and a chair in each one.   
     Like Landscape, Silence is a play based on memory, 
past reminiscences, man's loneliness and the difficulty of 
communication. 
     The first paragraph has the aim of pointing out 
affinities and differences  in  both plays. 
Landscape and Silence treat the same themes and present 
a certain affinity as regards: charactisation, style and 
dramatic structure. 
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     The differences concern, above all, the scenario and 
dialogue. 
     The second paragraph is devoted to a simple analysis 
of the work.   It starts with  an explanation of  the 
complexity of the dramatic structure, a complexity that is 
more apparent than real. Then, it proceeds to the analysis 
of various theatrical elements: scenario, stage directions, 
the nature of the characters  and their sentimental 
relations. 
    -CHAPTER FOUR. It consists of a short conclusive 
section dealing with the problem of the function of 
language in Pinter's  plays. 
     It starts with a couple of introductory pages about the 
critical condition of language nowadays. During recent 
years, scientific progress and psychoanalytical theories 
have increased the problem of functional language. As a 
consequence, the actual interest consists in finding a new 
means  of communication,  capable of re-evaluating 
words.  
     In this process, the contribution made by Pinter's 
theatre is remarkable.  
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     Chapter four proceeds with a paragraph that points out 
the element of originality in Pinter's language. It is a sort 
of completion of what was said at the beginning of 
chapter one, and the circle connects back to the originality 
of Pinter's  figure among the dramatists of our time. It is 
not by chance if Pinter's work has given rise to the term 
Pinteresque, referring to Pinter's original way of writing 
by using everyday conversation. 
     Everyday conversation,  together with pauses, silences 
and a considerable parsimony of words, are the great 
qualities of  Pinter's  writing as  analyzed in the last 
chapter. 
     Thematically, this chapter puts an end to that process 
of investigation into the sense of looming menace begun 
at the beginning of this study . 
     According to the author, in the context of society, 
language assumes a defensive or an offensive function in 
order to protect the living space of a  human being 
threatened by the presence of a real or psychological 
intruder. 
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     By synthesis, language  is an everyday  weapon  used 
by man in his struggle against his fellow creatures and the 
reality of the external world.