Page 316 - DENG403_BRITISH_DRAMA

British Drama

Notes

By the time Peter Hall’s London production of The Homecoming (1964) reached
Broadway in 1967, Pinter had become a celebrity playwright, and the play garnered
four Tony Awards, among other awards.
During 1964–1967, Pinter also wrote the radio play A Slight Ache, first broadcast on the BBC Third
Programme in 1959 and then adapted to the stage and performed at the Arts Theatre Club in 1961.
A Night Out (1960) was broadcast to a large audience on Associated British Corporation’s television
show Armchair Theatre, after being transmitted on BBC Radio 3, also in 1960. His play Night School
was first televised in 1960 on Associated Rediffusion. The Collection premièred at the Aldwych
Theatre in 1962, and The Dwarfs, adapted from Pinter’s then unpublished novel of the same title,
was first broadcast on radio in 1960, then adapted for the stage in a double bill with The Lover,
which was then televised on Associated Rediffusion in 1963; and Tea Party, a play that Pinter
developed from his 1963 short story, first broadcast on BBC TV in 1965.
Working as both a screenwriter and as a playwright, Pinter composed a script called The Compartment
(1966), for a trilogy of films to be contributed by Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Pinter, of
which only Beckett’s film, entitled Film, was actually produced. Then Pinter turned his unfilmed
script into a television play, which was produced as The Basement, both on BBC 2 and also on stage
in 1968.

Memory Plays (1968–1982)

From the late 1960s through the early 1980s, Pinter wrote a series of plays and sketches that explore
complex ambiguities, elegiac mysteries, comic vagaries, and other quicksand-like characteristics of
memory and which critics sometimes classify as Pinter’s memory plays. These include Landscape
(1968), Silence (1969), Night (1969), Old Times (1971), No Man’s Land (1975), The Proust Screenplay
(1977), Betrayal (1978), Family Voices (1981), Victoria Station (1982), and A Kind of Alaska (1982). Some
of Pinter’s later plays, including Party Time (1991), Moonlight (1993), Ashes to Ashes (1996), and
Celebration (2000) draw upon some features of his memory dramaturgy in their focus on the past in
the present, but they have personal and political resonances and other tonal differences from these
earlier memory plays.

Overtly Political Plays and Sketches (1980–2000)

Following a three-year period of creative drought in the early 1980s after his marriage to Antonia
Fraser and the death of Vivien Merchant, Pinter’s plays tended to become shorter and more overtly
political, serving as critiques of oppression, torture, and other abuses of human rights, linked by
the apparent invulnerability of power. Just before this hiatus, in 1979, Pinter re-discovered his
manuscript of The Hothouse, which he had written in 1958 but had set aside; he revised it and then
directed its first production himself at Hampstead Theatre in London, in 1980. Like his plays of the
1980s, The Hothouse concerns authoritarianism and the abuses of power politics, but it is also a
comedy, like his earlier comedies of menace. Pinter played the major role of Roote in a 1995 revival
at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester.

Pinter’s brief dramatic sketch precisely (1983) is a duologue between two bureaucrats
exploring the absurd power politics of mutual nuclear annihilation and deterrence. His first
overtly political one-act play is one for the Road (1984).

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