ABSTRACT
The works of Harold Pinter are peopled with the wounded and the criminal, and Pinter’s fascination with crime and crime stories is well documented (Gillen, Kane, Kundert-Gibbs). In his early works such as The Birthday Party (1958), The Dumb Waiter (1959), and No Man’s Land (1975), hit men and vagrants dominate the stage. At first glance, the characters seem to behave like the Hollywood gangsters they mimic —Pinter admits that films like noir classic The Killers were influential to his early writings-but as his dramas unfold, it becomes clear that many of these unsavory types are more virtuous than the society they supposedly undermine.1 Frequently, Pinter’s thugs are not the threats to, but the victims or products of, the status quo. More recent dramas such as One for the Road (1985), Mountain Language (1988), and Party Time (1991) make Pinter’s inversion of criminal stereotypes explicit: the imprisoned, the alleged criminals, are, in fact, innocent victims of oppressive governments that enslave them. Even domestic dramas such as The Lover (1963), The Homecoming (1965), and A Kind of Alaska (1982) exhibit at the very least an atmosphere of transgression.
