Ariel Dorfman and Harold Pinter: Politics of the Periphery and Theater of the Metropolis

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, with his memory plays Harold Pinter staged his own aesthetic revolution by breaking out of the traps represented by the Comedies of Menace. Pinter, as Noël Coward said, is a genuine original and a superb craftsman. In Old Times, he drastically breaks our traditional understanding of “time” and “memory”, endowing memory with a special quality. It becomes a net which can be weaved randomly. From the perspective of spatial theory, the paper aims at analyzing the temporal characteristics and spatial characteristics of Old Times and exploring the inner world of modern people. It comes to a conclusion that characters create the past story according to their psychological or tactical needs of the moment; in other words, memory is the means of psychological domination. The play also intends to reveal something universal: the sense of crisis and loneliness. Deeley and Anna trap themselves in power struggle because they see each other as a threat to their relationship with Kate. So it suggests that each man is an island.

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Harold Pinter

The Yearbook of English Studies ◽

10.2307/3507044 ◽

1980 ◽

Vol 10 ◽

pp. 363

Author(s):

Hersh Zeifman ◽

Arnold P. Hinchliffe

Keyword(s):

Harold Pinter

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A Brief History of Clive Barker

New Theatre Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0266464x07000218 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 23 (4) ◽

pp. 295-303

Author(s):

Clive Barker

Keyword(s):

Harold Pinter ◽

History Of ◽

The Way

I was born in Middlesbrough in 1931, and it's been uphill all the way since then. To a certain extent my life has been a process of being sold a dream which has never been realized, along with many other people in my generation, from Henry Livings and Harold Pinter through Wesker and Arden to John McGrath. We were the wartime generation, the last generation to remember what life was like before the war and during it.

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