ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by showing how Martin Esslin’s Theatre of the Absurd, while useful, also deactivated the revolutionary power of the absurdist movement. Thanks to his efficient definition, all the absurdists used language nonsensically, presented life as meaningless, and violated theatrical conventions. In this chapter, I show how Pinter’s works exhibit Esslin’s conventions, but I also show how the works are uniquely Pinter’s. Unlike Samuel Beckett’s plays with their post-apocalyptic and mysterious settings, Pinter’s plays are set in domestic settings. Here, Pinter explores the nature of totalitarianism. By placing tyranny among the teapots, Pinter creates an uncanny effect that invites us to consider our everyday uses and abuses of power, particularly in and among our relational tribes. I chose plays from the conventional periods of Pinter’s development as a writer. To represent the comedies of menace, I used The Room, The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter, and The Homecoming. For the memory plays, I chose Old Times, Betrayal, and the trilogy, Family Voices, A Kind of Alaska, and Victoria Station. The political choices are One for the Road, Mountain Language, Ashes to Ashes, and The Pres and the Officer. Through the discussion of the selected plays, as well as reference to Pinter’s Nobel Prize Speech, the essay demonstrates that for Pinter, power, its uses and abuses, begins at home.
