ABSTRACT
A brief, exemplary sequence in Alain Resnais’s Holocaust documentary Night and Fog (1955) begins with the exterior of a comfortable villa, home to a Nazi commandant. The narrator reports that the residence was located near one of the concentration camps. Subsequently, three snapshots depict the wives of various commandants. One poses in the parlor, smiling, with a group of well-dressed visitors. Another sits beside her husband, a contented dog in her lap. The banality of these images is somehow intolerable. They evoke real but macabre domestic dramas performed in the shadows of the camps. Harold Pinter’s later plays explore similar convergences of horror and civility. In particular, Party Time (1991) enlarges the moral and political implications of Resnais’s archival photographs, dramatizing a grotesque cocktail party for the ruling class during an evening of brutal military sup pression. The play’s political tenor and unspecified setting are consistent with three of Pinter’s other works of the period: The New World Order (also 1991), One for the Road (1984), and Mountain Language (1988). At the same time, however, plays like Party Time and One for the Road reveal the summit of an authoritarian class structure whose foundations date much earlier. These works extend Pinter’s previous treatments of criminality, adding a new branch to an evolving genealogy of thugs. The plutocrats, socialites, and functionaries of the later plays are affluent relations of the gangsters and sociopaths in The Birthday Party (1958), The Dumb Waiter (1960), and The Homecoming (1965). The glib prattling of the intelligentsia echoes the enigmatic chatter of the criminals. The privileged environments of the first group complement the uncertain, alienated spaces occupied by the latter. These diverse works compose Pinter’s extended meditation on the proximity of civility and barbarism. Collectively, they develop a mise èn scene in keeping with the villa, the dog, and the commandant.
