ABSTRACT
No one goes to jail in the plays of Harold Pinter or David Mamet-which is not to say that crime doesn’t exist. It’s just that it’s likely to go unpunished. In Pinter’s “comedy of menace,” violence, often implied, is never disciplined. The intrusion of Goldberg and McCann in The Birthday Party-hit men, avengersdisrupts the boarding-house comedy, bringing threats, abuse, fear, and abduction but they do not pay for their crime. At the end of The Dumb Waiter, Ben pulls his gun on Gus, but no shot is fired. In The Caretaker, crime and criminal behavior occur but while Mick directs his violence at Davies and then a Buddha, which he smashes against a wall, his aggression receives no check. The onstage violence of The Room-Bert violently beating Riley-again occurs with no penalty. In Pinter the perpetrators of these acts remain free.1
