Drama: the main characteristics.

Drama can be divided into serious drama, tragedy, comic drama, melodrama, and farce.

Drama differs from other forms of literature in that it demands a stage and performances. It can be enjoyed by both spectators and readers. But the fact is that most plays are written to be produced and must be performed. The word “drama” comes from the Greek meaning “a thing done”. The playwright supplies dialogues for the characters to speak and stage directions that give information about costumes, lighting, scenery, properties, the setting, music, sound effects, and the characters’ movements and ways of speaking. From its beginnings, drama, like other forms of literature, was meant to tell the story of humankind in conflict with the world. A play is human action or human experience dramatized for stage production. Poetic elements of technique and strategies in a play must be made visible. Through plot, a playwright “imitates” movements of existence, adjusting the rhythm to fit the mode of presentation, whether that mode is comedy or farce, tragedy or melodrama, tragicomedy or pantomime.

2. The Theatre of the Absurd, or Theater of the Absurd (French: “Le Théâtre de l’Absurde”) is a designation for particular plays written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, as well as to the style of theatre which has evolved from their work.

The term was coined by the critic Martin Esslin, who made it the title of a 1962 book on the subject. Esslin saw the work of these playwrights as giving artistic articulation to Albert Camus’ philosophy that life is inherently without meaning, and so one must find one’s own meaning as illustrated in his work The Myth of Sisyphus.

The “Theatre of the Absurd” is thought to have its origins in Dadaism, nonsense poetry and avant-garde art of the 1910s–1920s. Despite its critics, this genre of theatre achieved popularity when World War II highlighted the essential precariousness of human life.

The expression “Theater of the Absurd” has been criticized by some writers, and one also finds the expressions “Anti-Theater” and “New Theater”. According to Martin Esslin, the four defining playwrights of the movement are Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Arthur Adamov, although each of these writers has entirely unique preoccupations and techniques that go beyond the term “absurd”. Other writers often associated with this group include Tom Stoppard, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Fernando Arrabal, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee and Jean Tardieu. Playwrights who served as an inspiration to the movement include Alfred Jarry, Luigi Pirandello, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Guillaume Apollinaire, the surrealists and many more.

The “Absurd” or “New Theater” movement was, in its origin, a distinctly Paris-based (and left bank) avant-garde phenomenon tied to extremely small theaters in the Quartier Latin; the movement only gained international prominence over time.

In practice, The Theatre of the Absurd departs from realistic characters, situations and all of the associated theatrical conventions. Time, place and identity are ambiguous and fluid, and even basic causality frequently breaks down. Meaningless plots, repetitive or nonsensical dialogue and dramatic non-sequiturs are often used to create dream-like, or even nightmare-like moods. There is a fine line, however, between the careful and artful use of chaos and non-realistic elements and true, meaningless chaos. While many of the plays described by this title seem to be quite random and meaningless on the surface, an underlying structure and meaning is usually found in the midst of the chaos.

The New York based theater company Untitled Theater Company # 61 purports to present a “modern theater of the absurd,” consisting of new plays in the genre and classic plays interpreted by new directors. Among their projects was the Ionesco Festival, a festival of the complete works of Eugène Ionesco, and the Havel Festival, the complete works of Václav Havel.

3. Harold Pinter: biography and plays.

Harold Pinter (born 10 October, 1930) is a British playwright, screenwriter, poet, actor, director, author, and political activist, best known for his plays The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1959), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), and for his screenplay adaptations of novels by others, such as The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1980), and The Trial (1993).

He achieved international success as one of the most complex post-World War II dramatists. Harold Pinter’s plays are noted for their use of silence to increase tension, understatement, and cryptic small talk. Equally recognizable are the ‘Pinteresque’ themes − nameless menace, erotic fantasy, obsession and jealousy, family hatred and mental disturbance. In 2005, Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

“I don’t know how music can influence writing, but it has been very important for me, both jazz and classical music. I feel a sense of music continually in writing, which is a different matter from having been influenced by it.” (Harold Pinter in Playwrights at Work, ed. by George Plimpton, 2000).

Harold Pinter was born in Hackney, a working-class neighborhood in London’s East End, the son of a tailor. Both of his parents were Jewish, born in England. As a child Pinter got on well with his mother, but he didn’t get on well with his father, who was a strong disciplinarian. On the outbreak of World War II Pinter was evacuated from the city to Cornwall; to be wrenched from his parents was a traumatic event for Pinter. He lived with 26 other boys in a castle on the coast. At the age of 14, he returned to London. “The condition of being bombed has never left me,” Pinter later said.

Pinter was educated at Hackney Downs Grammar School, where he acted in school productions. At school one of Pinter’s main intellectual interests was English literature, particularly poetry. He also read works of Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway.

After two unhappy years Pinter left his studies at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. In 1949 Pinter was fined by magistrates for having, as a conscientious objector, refused to do his national service. Pinter had two trials. “I could have gone to prison − I took my toothbrush to the trials − but it so happened that the magistrate was slightly sympathetic, so I was fined instead, thirty pounds in all. Perhaps I’ll be called up again in the next war, but I won’t go.” (from Playwrights at Work). Pinter’s father paid the fine in the end, a substantial sum of money.

In 1950 Pinter started to publish poems in Poetry (London) under the name Harold Pinta. He worked as a bit-part actor on a BBC Radio program, Focus on Football Pools. He also studied for a short time at the Central School of Speech and Drama and toured Ireland from 1951 to 1952 with a Shakespearean troupe. In 1953 he appeared during Donald Wolfit’s 1953 season at the King’s Theatre in Hammersmith.

After four more years in provincial repertory theatre under the pseudonym David Baron, Pinter began to write for the stage. The Room (1957), originally written for Bristol University’s drama department, was finished in four days. A Slight Ache, Pinter’s first radio piece, was broadcast on the BBC in 1959. His first full-length play, The Birthday Party, was first performed by Bristol University’s drama department in 1957 and produced in 1958 in the West End. The play, which closed with disastrous reviews after one week, dealt in a Kafkaesque manner with an apparently ordinary man who is threatened by strangers for an unknown reason. He tries to run away but is tracked down. Although most reviewers were hostile, Pinter produced in rapid succession the body of work which made him the master of “the comedy of menace.” “I find critics on the whole a pretty unnecessary bunch of people,” Pinter said decades later in an interview. “We don’t need critics to tell the audiences what to think.”

Pinter’s major plays originate often from a single, powerful visual image. They are usually set in a single room, whose occupants are threatened by forces or people whose precise intentions neither the characters nor the audience can define. The struggle for survival or identity dominates the action of his characters. Language is not only used as a means of communication but as a weapon. Beneath the words, there is a silence of fear, rage and domination, fear of intimacy.

“Pinter’s dialogue is as tightly − perhaps more tightly − controlled than verse,” Martin Esslin writes in The People Wound (1970). “Every syllable, every inflection, the succession of long and short sounds, words and sentences, is calculated to nicety. And precisely the repetitiousness, the discontinuity, and the circularity of ordinary vernacular speech are here used as formal elements with which the poet can compose his linguistic ballet.” Pinter refuses to provide rational justifications for action, but offers existential glimpses of bizarre or terrible moments in people’s lives.

ASTON − You said you wanted me to get you up.

DAVIES − What for?

ASTON − You said you were thinking of going to Sidcup.

DAVIES − Ay, that’d be a good thing, if I got there.

ASTON − Doesn’t look like much of a day.

DAVIES − Ay, well, that’s shot it, en’t it? (from The Caretaker)

In 1960 Pinter wrote The Dumb Waiter. With his second full-length play, The Caretaker (1960), Pinter made his breakthrough as a major modern talent, although in Düsseldorf the play was booed. The Caretaker was followed by A Slight Ache (1961), The Collection (1962), The Dwarfs (1963), The Lover (1963).

The Homecoming (1965) is perhaps the most enigmatic of all Pinter’s early works. It won a Tony Award, the Whitbread Anglo-American Theater Award, and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. In the story an estranged son, Teddy, brings his wife Ruth home to London to meet his family, his father Max, a nagging, aggressive ex-butcher, and other tough members of the all-male household. At the end Teddy returns alone to his university job in America. Ruth stays as a mother or whore to his family. Everyone needs her. − Similar motifs − the battle for domination in a sexual context − recur in Landscape and Silence (both 1969), and in Old Times (1971), in which the key line is “Normal, what’s normal?” After The Homecoming Pinter said that he “couldn’t any longer stay in the room with this bunch of people who opened doors and came in and went out.”

Several of Pinter’s plays were originally written for British radio or TV. In the 1960s he also directed several of his dramas. After Betrayal (1978) Pinter wrote no new full-length plays until Moonlight (1994). Short plays include A Kind of Alaska (1982), inspired by the case histories in Oliver Sack’s Awakenings (1973).

From the 1970s Pinter has directed a number of stage plays and the American Film Theatre production of Butler (1974). In 1977 he published a screenplay based on Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Closely associated with the director Peter Hall, he became an associate director of the National Theatre after Hall was nominated as the successor of Sir Lawrence Olivier. Pinter has received many awards, including the Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear in 1963, BAFTA awards in 1965 and in 1971, the Hamburg Shakespeare Prize in 1970, the Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or in 1971, and the Commonwealth Award in 1981. He was awarded a CBE in 1966, but he later turned down John Major’s offer of a knighthood. In 1996 he was given the Laurence Olivier Award for a lifetime’s achievement in the theatre. In 2002 he was made a Companion of Honour for services to literature.

Pinter was married from 1956 to the actress Vivien Merchant. For a time, they lived in Notting Hill Gate in a slum. Eventually Pinter managed to borrow some money and move away. Although Pinter said in an interview in 1966, that he never has written any part for any actor, his wife Vivien frequently appeared in his plays. After his first marriage dissolved in 1980, Pinter married the biographer Lady Antonia Fraser. Vivien Merchant died in 1982. The divorce separated Pinter from his son Daniel, a writer and musician.

Pinter work include a number of screenplays, including The Servant (1963), The Accident (1967), The Go-Between (1971), The Last Tycoon (1974, dir. by Elia Kazan), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981, novel by John Fowles), Betrayal (1982), Turtle Diary (1985), Reunion (1989), The Handmaid’s Tale (1990), The Comfort of Strangers (1990), and The Trial by Franz Kafka (1990). In the 1990s Pinter became more active as a director than as a playwright. He oversaw David Mamet’s Oleanna and several works by Simon Gray.

Since the overthrow of Chile’s President Allende in 1973, Pinter has been active in human rights issues, but his opinions have often been controversial. During the Kosovo crisis in 1999, Pinter condemned Nato’s intervention, and said it will “only aggravate the misery and the horror and devastate the country”. In 2001 Pinter joined The International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, which also included former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Milosevic was arrested by the U.N. war crimes tribunal. In January 2002 Pinter was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus. In his speech to an anti-war meeting at the House of Commons in November 2002 Pinter joined the world-wide debate over the so-called “preventive war” against Iraq: “Bush has said: ‘We will not allow the world’s worst weapons to remain in the hands of the world’s worst leaders.’ Quite right. Look in the mirror chum. That’s you.” In February 2005 Pinter announced in an interview that he has decided to abandon his career as a playwright and put all his energy into politics. “I’ve written 29 plays. Isn’t that enough?”