Pinter

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Harold Pinter Winners and losers in the plays of Harold Pinter
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"I think what you're talking about began in The Dumb Waiter. Violence is really only an expression of the question of dominance and subservience, which is possibly a repeated theme in my plays. I wrote a short story a long time ago called The Examination, and my ideas of violence carried on from there. That short story dealt very explicitly the with two people in one room having a battle of an unspecified nature, in which the question was one of who was dominant at what point and how they were going to be dominant and what tools they would use to achieve dominance and how they would try to undermine the other person's dominance. A threat is constantly there: it's got to do with this question of being in the uppermost position, or attempting to be." [1] Harold Pinter 1930 -
Dialogue between characters in Pinter's plays can often seem enigmatic, and its purpose obscure, but it becomes less so when we realise that as often as not a battle is taking place between the characters, and that identifiable strategies are being employed. In this essay I would like to consider some of those battles, particularly in The Caretaker, The Homecoming, Old Times, and No Man's Land, in the light of the comment above made by Harold Pinter on his short story The Examination, about 'this question of dominance and subservience' being a repeated theme in his plays. I will examine what seem to be the main characteristics of the battle depicted in The Examination, and I suggest that they represent a blueprint for some of the competitive strategies adopted by characters in Pinter's plays. The Examination describes in detail one particular battle in which the narrator is defeated by his opponent, Kullus, but it is evident that the positions of dominance and subservience oscillate back and...