1 Floating Heads, Coffee Cups and the Figure at the Window: The Surrealist Set of Harold Pinter’s Old Times Old Times. Act I. ANNA stands, walks to the window. ANNA: And the sky is so still. Pause Can you see that tiny ribbon of light? Is that the sea? Is that the horizon? 1 2 1 Harold Pinter, Old Times, (London: Methuen, 1971) pg. 22 2 Peter Mumford, "Peter Mumford puts ETC LED's to the Test in 'Old Times'" Whitelight. http://www.whitelight.ltd.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2013/02/petermumfordputsetcledsto thetestinoldtimes11.jpg.
Transcript
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Floating Heads, Coffee Cups and the Figure at the Window: The Surrealist Set of Harold Pinter’s Old Times
Old Times. Act I. ANNA stands, walks to the window. ANNA: And the sky is so still. Pause Can you see that tiny ribbon of light? Is that the sea? Is that the horizon?1
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1 Harold Pinter, Old Times, (London: Methuen, 1971) pg. 22 2 Peter Mumford, "Peter Mumford puts ETC LED's to the Test in 'Old Times'" Whitelight. http://www.whitelight.ltd.uk/wp-‐‑content/uploads/2013/02/peter-‐‑mumford-‐‑puts-‐‑etc-‐‑leds-‐‑to-‐‑the-‐‑test-‐‑in-‐‑old-‐‑times11.jpg.
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3 Dalí, Salvador, Woman At The Window At Figueres, 1926, Oil on Board, www.salvadordali.org/womanatthewindowatgifueres/ 4 René Magritte, The Pilgrim. 1966. http://www.renemagritte.org/the-‐‑pilgrim.jsp 5 René Magritte, Personal Values, 1966, Oil on Canvas, http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/collection/artwork/27665
Woman at the Window at Figueres The Pilgrim
Personal Values
Personal Values
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The plays of Harold Pinter have frustrated criticism and provoked extravagant
speculation due to the imperceptible transformation of recognisable and
mundane scenarios into uncertain and frightening landscapes. While the
twentieth-‐‑century dramas of playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene
Ionesco, Tom Stoppard and Vaclav Havel have also confounded audiences, Pinter
was unique amongst his contemporaries in being appraised as a Modern
dramatist while preserving the veneer of naturalism. For instance, the set of the
1970 play Old Times mimics an ordinary lounge-‐‑room, requiring a long window
between two doors, two couches, one-‐‑arm chair and a few lamps on a table. As
numerous productions have embodied, the stage directions indicate an
unremarkable ‘modern’ decor. Critic Katharine Worth observed that compared
to his contemporaries, Pinter’s designs were conservative: “His stage has held no
visual image as fantastic and arresting as the urns of Play, the Mouth of Not I, the
absurd tableaux of After Magritte, nor has his fondness for the surreal art of
Picasso and Francis Bacon been reflected in any obvious way in his scenic
concepts.”6 This essay will contrarily propose that the enigmatic ‘Modern’ quality
of the Pinter play arises from the experimental treatment of set and setting,
reading Old Times as the dramatic embodiment of the Surrealist binary of
internal and external reality, and placing Pinter’s tableaux of the figure by the
window as a visual image as fantastic as the absurd landscapes of Beckett or
Stoppard. First a direct connection between the playwright and André Breton’s
1934 essay What is Surrealism will be elucidated, informing an analysis of the
unification of internal and external reality in Pinter’s poem ‘August Becomes’. A
6 Katherine Worth, 'Pinter's Scenic Imagery' in Stephen Gale, Critical Essays On Harold Pinter, 1st ed. (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co. 1980) pg. 258
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comparative study between the works of Dali and Magritte, and Pinter’s Old
Times will then demonstrate the correlation between Surrealist technique such
as optical illusion and the severing of logical connections, and Pinter’s
unsteadying dramatic depiction of the set. Finally considering the treatment of
the verbal landscapes of London, Sicily and the English countryside that
supposedly exist beyond the room on stage, this essay will demonstrate how the
uncertainty Pinter casts over the stage space allegorically refracts upon the
audience’s experience of reality. Pinter’s conventional set can thus be considered
as an avant-‐‑garde experiment that intentionally destabilises the spectator’s
experience and notion of reality, inspired and facilitated by the concepts of the
Surrealists.
In 1934 André Breton, one of the founding figures of the Surrealist Movement,
announced what he deemed to be the ‘supreme aim’ of the collective of artists
and thinkers who applied their creative talent to the re-‐‑examination of the world
in the aftermath of WWI. While delivering a lecture to an audience in Brussels,
Breton proclaimed:
“the final unification is the supreme aim of Surrealism: interior reality and
exterior reality being, in the present form of society, in contradiction, we have
assigned ourselves the task of confronting these two realities with one another
on every possible occasion …to give this interplay of forces all the extension
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necessary for the trend of these two adjoining realities to become one and the
same thing.”7
Breton’s “final unification” proposed the unstable realm of the mind containing
dreams, fantasies and the unconscious, would no longer be held in opposition to
the ‘real world.’ Linda Renton in a 2002 study affirmed in a personal interview
that Pinter, like many of his contemporary dramatists8, counted the Surrealists
as one of his greatest inspirations.9 Pinter revealed that in 1951, at the age of
twenty-‐‑one, he responded to Breton’s Manifesto through the composition of a
poem entitled ‘August Becomes.’ The opening stanza cites the Manifesto: “this
summer roses are blue, and the wood is made of glass”10, establishing the
intention of the poem to be the application of Breton’s vision -‐‑ to create a lyrical
representation of the world in which internal and external reality ‘become one
and the same.’
7 André Breton, “What is Surrealism?” (1934) accessed at "Breton, What is Surrealism?" http://home.wlv.ac.uk/~fa1871/whatsurr.html 8 Such as Antoin Artaud 9 Linda Renton, "Vision and the Object of Desire", in Pinter and the Object of Desire: An Approach through the Screenplays, ed. Linda Renton, (Oxford: Legenda, 2002), pg. 2 10 Harold Pinter, ‘August Becomes’, (1951) in Linda Renton, "Vision and the Object of Desire", in Pinter and the Object of Desire: An Approach through the Screenplays, ed. Linda Renton, (Oxford: Legenda, 2002), pg. 3-‐‑4
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Seeing eyes contained in the anchor of
the day, the weed in the sky and the
heart, I walk holding dust in a glassbowl…
At the blink of an eyelid an island
dies in the moat of memory.
Here, as we open the small
bridge and the ringed house of children,
where I gave the key into the locked
year, is rusted the summer door…
All rooms speak. The elbowed
place of sheer ending. The gestured
ffigure on the tigercarpet. Distortion in the
curtain’s mirror. Displacement
of the room in summer’s shoulder.
However breasts I take there
is no answer. On the disarray of woman
and the night, behind the sand-‐‑dunes
of memory shaping a kingdom…
Natural and man-‐‑made environments are metaphorically engaged to represent
memory, desire and fantasy. This is of course common in poetic expression, as
we are dependant upon our knowledge of landscapes and objects when
expressing abstract concepts, however Pinter prevents the reader from realising
a single metaphoric comparison as the poem engages a sequence of transitory
images that evolve from one to the other without completion. The poem is
forever shifting and reforming, from “seeing eyes contained in the anchor of the
day”, to “dust in a glassbowl”, onto “the moat of memory”, into the “summer
house” where “all rooms speak”, and on to the “sand-‐‑dunes of memory shaping a
Kingdom.”11 The final three stanzas eventuate in an alienating landscape where
the memory of an encounter with a girl and the physical features of a room form
dream-‐‑like hybrids such as “the figure on the tiger carpet”, “the elbowed place of
sheer ending” and “woman in the fireplace”. The internal and external are
‘united’ in “the disarray of woman and the night”,12 forming a conglomeration
11 Harold Pinter, ‘August Becomes’, (1951) in Linda Renton, "Vision and the Object of Desire", in Pinter and the Object of Desire: An Approach through the Screenplays, ed. Linda Renton, (Oxford: Legenda, 2002), pg. 3-‐‑4 12 ibid.
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that makes it impossible for the reader to discern whether the poem represents
the inside of the persona’s mind, or a figure traversing a house. The reader is
made aware of the subjectivity of individual experience and of the impossibility
of separating the external world from its reconstruction in the individual’s head.
The application of Breton’s unification of the external and internal reappears in
Pinter’s memory plays, as will be demonstrated through an analysis of Old Times.
Pinter can be seen as an avant-‐‑garde playwright extending the Surrealists goal to
collapse the binary of internal and external reality through an innovative
dramatic treatment of the set. This process engages techniques of the Surrealist
painters including optical illusion, the severing of logic between word and image
and the manipulation of the spectator’s gaze. In What is Surrealism Breton
praised the artist Salvador Dalí for his invention of the critical-‐‑paranoiac state.
The theory depended upon the ability of the human brain to rationalise
contradictory images, preventing a spectator when perceiving an artwork from
establishing a single, comfortable or logical interpretation of an object in their
external reality.13 Alongside the infamous example of Swans Reflecting
Elephants14 is Dalí’s more subtle Woman At The Window At Figueres 15. The
painting depicts a young-‐‑woman with her back to the spectator, leaning out a
window that looks to the ocean in a non-‐‑descript room. The painting retains
naturalistic detail, yet the work carries an air of mystery. Foremost, although the
13 André Breton, “What is Surrealism?” (1934) accessed at "Breton, What is Surrealism?" http://home.wlv.ac.uk/~fa1871/whatsurr.html 14 Salvador Dalí, Swans Reflecting Elephants. 1937, Oil on Canvas, http://www.dali.com/blog/swans-‐‑reflecting-‐‑elephants-‐‑is-‐‑one-‐‑of-‐‑those-‐‑dali-‐‑paintings-‐‑everybody-‐‑loves/ 15 Dalí, Salvador, Woman At The Window At Figueres, 1926, Oil on Board, www.salvadordali.org/womanatthewindowatgifueres/
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view outside is depicted, the spectator is uncertain of the object of her attention.
The spectator is drawn to look closer and closer at the view, treating the one-‐‑
dimensional image as a three-‐‑dimensional landscape. We begin to look past the
frame of the painting, into the room, through the window and out to the ocean, as
if it were real, although in our world it all exists on a single sheet of canvas.
André Breton claimed that Dalí’s optical illusions were capable of being applied
to all modes including painting, poetry, the cinema, objects, fashion, sculpture
and the history of art.16 In Pinter’s Old Times we add theatre to the list.
Old Times opens with an image reminiscent of Dalí’s Woman At The Window At
Figueres, depicting a woman’s silhouette framed by a single window centre-‐‑
stage. Whereas in Dalí’s painting the viewer becomes uncertain of the distinction
between the representation of the landscape of the canvas and reality itself, on
stage the confusion occurs between the corporeal body of the actor, and the
illusory implications of theatrical devices. While the couple Kate and Deeley
discuss what their anticipated dinner-‐‑guest, Anna, might be like twenty years
after they last saw her, the actress playing Anna stands ‘still’ in ‘dim light’,
‘looking out’ the window.17 The audience are simultaneously aware that the
actress is ‘there’ before them on stage and ‘not there’, unacknowledged and
symbolically obscured by shadow. This illusion has been rationalised in terms of
a cinematic crosscutting, as in one sense we perceive the moment before Anna
arrives on front-‐‑stage, and the moment when she has arrived further back.18
16 André Breton, “What is Surrealism?” (1934) accessed at "Breton, What is Surrealism?" http://home.wlv.ac.uk/~fa1871/whatsurr.html 17 Harold Pinter, Old Times, (London: Methuen, 1971) pg. 1 18 Refer to Gay Gibson-‐‑Cima, “Acting on the Cutting Edge: Pinter and the Syntax of Cinema”, Theatre Journal, Vol. 36, No. 1, (1984), pp. 43-‐‑56 pg. 43-‐‑45.
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Another interpretation has posited that the entire stage is a symbol of one of the
character’s minds, and Anna represents the ‘imagined figure’, a hazy memory or
fantasy being crafted into clarity.19 The optical illusion that predicates both of
these explanations is the theatrical spectacle. Like the viewer of the Dalí painting,
the spectator is confronted by the innate ability of their mind when viewing
theatre to resolve the contradiction between what is there and what they are
meant to see, as Pinter maintained across his theatrical career, in drama it is
possible for something to be “real and unreal at the same time”20, a dictum he
literally applied in the case of Anna.
Optical illusions are consistently employed across the play as contradictory
verbal claims, or verbal statements and visual images, make the familiar and
naturalistic setting of the room strange. For instance, Deeley claims his wife is so
dreamy he occasionally detaches her head, “I leave it floating” he states, despite
the fact the audience can see the actresses head is on her shoulders, “My head is
quite fixed. I have it on”, she assures him.21 Regardless of how seriously we take
Deeley’s comment, in the mind’s eye we are momentarily confronted with an
optical illusion. René Magritte, who depicted this precise conundrum of the
floating head in The Pilgrim.22 In this painting the normal torso of a man dressed
in a suit has a gap between the collar of his shirt and his bowler-‐‑hat, while the
19 Refer Christopher Hudgins, "Inside Out: Filmic Technique and the theatrical depiction of a consciousness in Harold Pinter's Old Times," Genre, XXII, (1980), pg. 360-‐‑365 20 Harold, Pinter, "Art, Truth & Politics," Lecture, Nobel Prize (2005) 21 Harold Pinter, Old Times, (London: Methuen, 1971) pg. 24 It is important to remember that at such moments, in the style traditionally attributed to the Pinter-‐‑play (FOOTNOTE), the actor delivering Deeley’s line will provide a serious tone, preventing the audience from immediately dismissing the claim as a joke or throwaway comment, and furthermore with the powerful opening moment in which Anna is “there and not there” the audience’s conventional attitude to a Realistic interpretation of text has already been shaken. 22 René Magritte, The Pilgrim. 1966. http://www.renemagritte.org/the-‐‑pilgrim.jsp
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missing face floats with a calm and disinterested expression inches to the left of
his body. In the instance of the Pinter play, the two perceptual experiences are
the audience’s visual perception of the corporality of the actor whose head is
situated firmly upon their neck, coupled with the imaginative image conjured in
the audience’s mind by Deeley’s claim Kate’s head ‘floats away’, which might look
something like Magritte’s work.
Hanna Scolnicov has also identified such recurring contradictions in Old Times as
an employment of Surrealist technique, highlighting the example of Kate’s final
monologue in which she conjures poetic images of Anna dead, ‘her face covered
in dirt’, while Anna sits before her.23 Scolnicov claims “Pinter used surrealistic
elements to further distance his plays from the dictates of positivistic
assumptions about reality…surrealistic elements undermine the stability of any
account of past events and prevent us from forming any firm picture of reality.”24
The most impressive instance is the optical illusion of the set, within which
Pinter induces the viewer to see two disparate temporal zones co-‐‑existing.
During Act I the characters are having after-‐‑dinner drinks in the lounge room
and Anna describes the apartment she lived in with Kate when they were young
girls -‐‑ it contained the two beds they slept in, framed by a window and an
armchair.25 The stage directions for Act II specify that the sofas of the lounge
room are to be replaced with two divans, mimicking the room that Anna has
23 Harold Pinter, Old Times, (London: Methuen, 1971) pg. 79 24 Hanna Scolnicov, "Surrealism and Memory: Old Times, A Kind of Alaska, Ashes to Ashes" in The Experimental Plays of Harold Pinter ed. By Hannah Scolnicov (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012), pg. 25 Harold Pinter, Old Times, (London: Methuen, 1971) pg. 32
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described she lived in with Kate.26 Yet Deeley states “we sleep here. These are
beds.”27 The set then represents Kate and Anna’s bedroom of the past, Kate and
Deeley’s bedroom of the present, whilst also encompassing the impossible third
hallucinatory image of the two interacting and co-‐‑existing. The memory which
should only be possible in the internal reality of the past becomes increasingly
indistinguishable from the supposedly physical reality of the present as the play
culminates in the enactment of Anna’s earlier story of the young man found
sobbing in an armchair in the middle of the night.28 Thus Pinter makes it
impossible for the audience to be certain of what they see on stage causing the
endless speculation of the reviewers and critics. They have asked: Have we gone
back in time? Are we in one of the character’s memories? Has Anna’s story
become a reality? Is any of the action real, or is it all imagined?29 Scolnicov offers
the most poignant solution, “we should not try to iron out the contradictions, to
suggest ingenious ways of reconciling the incompatible statements. They were
inserted deliberately to serve a particular function.”30 Pinter intentionally
engages optical illusion in order to leave the audience struggling to rationalize
what they have witnessed.
The effect of Pinter’s destabilisation of the set is dependant upon a second
technique of the Surrealists identified above in the treatment of the room – the
subversion of familiar and recognisable settings. As Pinter expressed in a 1971
26 ibid. Pg.47 27 ibid. Pg. 48 28 ibid. Pg. 71-‐‑74 29 Refer to Christopher Hudgins and Stephen H. Gale 30 Hanna Scolnicov, "Surrealism and Memory: Old Times, A Kind of Alaska, Ashes to Ashes" in The Experimental Plays of Harold Pinter ed. By Hannah Scolnicov (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012), pg. 147
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interview with Mel Gussow for the New York Times, the coffee cups were so
essential that the addition of the line, “Yes, I remember”, to the script prompted
him to re-‐‑write the stage directions:
“It was the one addition before London: the line is “Yes I remember.” And that
affected all the brandy and the coffee. It came in the middle of the brandy and the
coffee and affected the whole structure. In this play, the lifting of a coffee cup at
the wrong moment can damage the next five minutes. As for the sipping of coffee,
that can ruin the act.”31
Barbara Hurrell in her comparison of Pinter and René Magritte has identified
that alike the Surrealist painter Pinter “severs any apparent logical connection
between word and image.”32 Hurrel gives the example of Magritte’s painting
Personal Values, the work depicts a non-‐‑descript room in which a comb is
enlarged to dwarf a bed, and the obtuse walls have taken on the image of the
transparent sky beyond them. 33 Pinter’s emphasis of props has a similarly
distorting effect, he enhances the significance of mundane items to make them
appear to mean more than we would usually expect. For instance the pouring of
drinks is made significant as it is a rare physical response in the play and the
audience’s eyes are immediately drawn to the movement and shift in spatial
relations between characters when one stands to pour a drink. The ambiguity of
the action furthermore reflects uncertainty upon the accompanying dialogue of
31 Harold Pinter, "A Conversation (Pause) with Harold Pinter", By Mel Gussow, In Critical Essays on Harold Pinter, (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1971) pg. 26 32 Barbara Hurrell, “The Menace of the Commonplace: Pinter and Magritte," Centennial Review 27, (1983) pg. 89 33 René Magritte, Personal Values, 1966, Oil on Canvas, http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/collection/artwork/27665
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the actors. In the first instance in the play, Anna has rambled extensively in
monologue about her time in London with Kate when they were young girls. As
she concludes she appeals to Kate, “does it all still exist?”, who responds by
standing, without comment, pouring each of them coffee, and then remarking
“Yes, I remember.”34 The significance of the pouring of coffee that extends an
unsettling pause between Anna’s question and Kate’s response disturbs the
sincerity Kate’s affirmation. Thus Pinter’s embellishment of mundane props with
mystery is illuminated by a consideration of Magritte’s severing of the logical
connection between word and image, imbuing everyday with a strange and
threatening significance.
The uncertainty Pinter creates over the set on stage is refracted to destabilize the
external world beyond the room. A number of Pinter scholars, including
Scolnicov, have dismissed the significance of the external world by claiming
Pinter does away with exits and entrances, except those that move inwards to
the house.35 However this ignores the fact that the majority of Old Times
discusses the world beyond the room -‐‑ London, Sicily and the surrounding
countryside. Considering how each landscape is treated reveals that Pinter is
working to make the exterior world as uncertain as the world on stage.
34 Harold Pinter, Old Times, (London: Methuen, 1971) pg. 17 35 Hanna Scolnicov, "Surrealism and Memory: Old Times, A Kind of Alaska, Ashes to Ashes" in The Experimental Plays of Harold Pinter ed. By Hannah Scolnicov (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012), pg. 145 claims “the avoidance of using the entrance door has the effect of sealing off the room from the outside world.” And Harold, Pinter, "Filming 'The Caretaker'." By Kenneth Cavander. The Transantlantic Review 13 (Summer 1963), pg. 22 – Pinter criticized the tendency of critics to place his plays in a ‘vacuum’ “What I’m very pleased about myself is that in the film, as opposed to the play, we see a real house and real snow outside… when people are confronted with just a set, a room and a door, they often assumed it was all taking place in limbo, in a vacuum, and the world outside hardly existed, or had existed at some point but was now only half remembered.”
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The London landscape is recreated verbally by all three characters in conflicting
accounts of their experiences, these passages suggest the impossibility of
verifying what happened in the past, but equally of verifying the reality of the
present moment. Like the representation of memory in ‘August Becomes’, when
Anna in Act I of the play recounts her busy and exciting life with Kate in London
the landscape of London is represented by a collage of experiences, a disarray of
words and images composed in disjointed, and unfinished sentences. As she
switches between topics and thoughts she summons names and places ‘Albert
Hall’, ‘the opera’ and then skips hours or perhaps months forward or back to an
evening when they ate ‘scrambled eggs.’36 Although Anna attempts to hold
together the veneer of certainty about her past experiences with Kate, the form
of the passage betrays the internal process of recollection and the inherent
uncertainty of the past. The struggle is illuminated by Magritte’s description of
the deceptive relationship of internal and external reality, “although we see the
world as being outside ourselves, it is only a mental representation of it that we
experience inside ourselves.”37 This is what Pinter reveals in Anna’s recollection.
She attempts to project her mental representation of ‘old times’ back into the
external world and struggles to verbally represent how it was, repeatedly
appealing for Kate’s verification that it all happened, that it still exists in some
form. Similarly accounts of Sicily that seem verifiable due to the agreement of
Deeley and Anna, illogically begin with Deeley and Kate’s insinuations of the
specific details of Anna’s life, ‘drinking orange juice’ and catching ‘speed boats’.38
As Scolnicov has deduced, Pinter paints a ‘post-‐‑card’ version of the city that 36 Harold Pinter, Old Times, (London: Methuen, 1971) pg. 17 37 Rene Magritte quoted in Barbara Hurrell, “The Menace of the Commonplace: Pinter and Magritte," Centennial Review 27, (1983) pg. 82 38 Harold Pinter, Old Times, (London: Methuen, 1971) pg. 40-‐‑41
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collapses with Deeley’s announcement ‘My name is Orson Welles’39, “exploding
the possibility of our taking seriously anything he has just said about Anna and
about himself”40, and conjointly the place of Sicily.
The surrounding landscape becomes the most dubious reality as despite the
initial discussion of the sea’s proximity and the view out the window, Anna when
discouraging Kate from going out at night paints a London setting beyond the
door, “The park is dirty at night, all sorts of horrible people…there are shadows
everywhere and there are policemen…and you’ll see all the traffic and the noise
of the traffic and you’ll see all the hotels…”.41 The conflicting accounts of the
world beyond the room, and the impossibility of verifying what is occurring on
stage, make the real world as amorphous and unknown as the action onstage.
The window supposedly looks out to the external world, out to ‘the sea’,42 but as
Kate describes ‘the sea that has no ending or beginning’43 is as elusive as the
events being described inside the room. The sole occurrence at which Anna
describes what is out there, standing by the window, she phrases her statements
as questions: “What’s that ribbon of light? Is that the horizon? Is that the sea?” 44
How are we to believe her? Even if that is what she sees through the darkness of
an Autumn night,45 if Kate were to stand next to her and look out to the horizon
how would her vision of the landscape differ?
39 Harold Pinter, Old Times, (London: Methuen, 1971) pg. 42 40 Hanna Scolnicov, "Surrealism and Memory: Old Times, A Kind of Alaska, Ashes to Ashes" in The Experimental Plays of Harold Pinter ed. By Hannah Scolnicov (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012), pg. 150 41 Harold Pinter, Old Times, (London: Methuen, 1971) pg. 43-‐‑44 42 ibid. pg. 22 43 ibid. pg. 59 44 ibid. pg. 22 45 ibid. pg. 1
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Although Pinter’s naturalistic settings on the surface pale in comparison to the
likes of Beckett, the Surreal setting of Old Times is as sophisticated and avant-‐‑
garde as the set of Endgame46 where Clov is constantly sent to verify the
existence of the outside world, his master Hamm demanding he describe what he
sees. While Pinter’s plays retain the veneer of a mundane reality, the audience,
like the immobilized Hamm, are unable to verify the landscape on the other side
of the wall, let alone as Pinter provokes the audience to contemplate in his plays,
the reality of their everyday existence. While he has been most profoundly
remembered for ‘The Pinter Pause’, Harold Pinter should be equally celebrated
for his avant-‐‑garde experimentation with set and settings that upholds his place
as one of the most exceptional Modern dramatists of the 20th Century.
46 Samuel Beckett, Endgame, (New York: Grove Press, 1958)
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Bibliography
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Breton, André. “What is Surrealism?” (1934) accessed at "Breton, What is
