ABSTRACT
The second phase of Pinter’s work begins with two plays so radically different from anything Pinter had previously written there might seem to be no connection. The dominant/subservient conflict nearly vanishes but with startling consequences-when the conflict resurfaces in Old Times, it does so with a vengeance and without skipping a beat as the driving force of all else. The fractal geometry, that quality in Pinter’s plays in which the overall arc of the play’s conflict is mirrored in each act, each scene, and each beat, also returns with a difference: this time with public consequences. Never, throughout the whole of Pinter’s work, does the conflict expressed through the fractal geometry become repetitive or assume a merely mechanical form. For each play its function and form are specific to the nature of the dominant/subservient conflict. The full-length plays of the middle period Old Times, No Man’s Land, and Betrayal all contain the experimentation with both form and memory begun in Landscape and Silence but now give voice to some public consequences of the private conflict at the heart of all Pinter’s plays.
