Harold Pinter: The Art of Theater (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 3)
Harold Pinter
In St. Paul, we have two friends who are such fans and experts on Pinter, I wish I could substitute in the brilliant discussions going late into the night about Pinter's The Birthday Party or The Caretaker or The Homecoming. Should you wish to run into them -- or their ilk -- there will be a Pinter Festival this August in Pittsburgh. I wish I would go -- it will surely be a special occasion.
Throughout his Paris Review interview, Pinter talks a great deal about characters and their formation. Still, it's Pinter's success at crafting everyday moments of violence that stands out as part of his expertise. The interview hones in on this. Pinter announces a boredom with politics, a distrust of ideological statements of any kind, but an interest in cultural affairs and a caring attention to even bastard characters like Goldberg in The Birthday Party. On violence, art, and the world, he states this:
Share on FacebookThe world is a pretty violent place, it's as simple as that, so any violence in the plays comes out quite naturally. It seems to me an essential and inevitable factor.
I think what you're talking about began in The Dumb Waiter, which from my point of view is a relatively simple piece of work. The 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 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. That's something of what attracted me to do the screenplay of The Servant, which was someone else's story, you know. I wouldn't call this violence so much as a battle for positions; it's a very common, everyday thing.
