Time and Harold Pinter's Possible Realities: Art as Life, and Vice Versa

Abstract

IF WE COMPARE PLAYS such as Silence, Landscape, Monologue, and Old Times with plays such as The Room, The Birthday Party, A Slight Ache, or The Dumb Waiter, one thing that seems immediately clear is that Harold Pinter has undergone considerable evolution in his career as a playwright. And yet, when we look at the few official statements Pinter has released over the years about the vision that lies behind these plays, what seems to be equally clear is that he has, from the beginning, been concerned with elaborating a single idea. On March 8, 1960, the program brochure for The Room and The Dumb Waiter contained a printed sheet of paper in which, among other things, Pinter said: "The desire for verification is understandable but cannot always be satisfied. There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. The thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. The assumption that to verify what has happened and what is happening presents few problems I take to be inaccurate." In an address to drama students at Bristol in 1962, Pinter incorporated this statement into his speech and expanded it:

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