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Harold Pinter and oppression's closed rooms

Nicola D'Ugo

A Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded in these days to Harold Pinter. This is good news, given its extraordinary works of drama, which has few equals in a century. Add to this the news of his recurring theme: the invasion of domestic space, which is a metaphor for a struggle in which the other is not an equal, but a "similar" menacing.

Trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, before moving to acting in a prestigious Irish company, the English playwright Harold Pinter made his debut as the room with ( The Room) in 1957. His theater of the absurd (or comedy of menace), the linguistic registers that reproduce how to talk about the English social classes, stages the ongoing struggle of mediocre characters, taken from their daily needs, who commit petty acts, often incomprehensible. In his dramas are exposed situations seemingly trivial, funny and embarrassing, that border on the ridiculous, in light of the first paradoxes sewn on to that shred of existence that it pretends to be a dress suit them, before the past situations that emerge in the light memory space of a lost or obscured, gambling beliefs and intentions of a lifetime.

One of the great tricks of narrative and dramatic works is the mystery, the sense of danger, the initial misunderstanding that enlivens the curiosity of the viewer and reader. Dante knew this, with the opening of his terrified Comedy, Shakespeare knew it well with the ominous opening words of 'Hamlet , with the incredible sinking de The Tempest. Pinter is no exception. Its domestic situations since the beginning arouse a sense of strange curiosity, mystery, as are family environments (home, bedroom, kitchen, greenhouse, all distinctly British ), which then are nothing more than those of the plays of Osborne, Ayckbourn and Wesker.

This much is clear from the outset: the problem pinteriani character is not social, because the house is a metaphor, not the stage where most of the speeches a pulsating life outside. The mystery of Pinter's plays is the mystery of life, with its dangers, its threats, made particularly unpleasant from being all set in more familiar places. The family room is like a cell that wants to isolate itself, but it is continuously flooded, and which has a mnemonic component explosive. The theme of memory (a memory threatening) was dear to Beckett: Beckett, there are expansions in time, forgetting the most recent gestures that do not coincide with the growth of epidermal signs of time, in Pinter, the time is contracted to the press memories embodied by the 'Visitor' (theme Beckett, but, also, which seem Eliott), so that the experience erased by the apparent epoché biographical character explodes with all its devastating force in the precarious balance of life.

emblematic in this regard, it is ride home ( The Homecoming, 1964), with the return from her son, accompanied by his wife unknown. The problem of domestic space becomes a play, until the child in his career if he goes alone, while his beautiful wife is taken by the family, as the person most suited to the needs of parents, perhaps conquered and exploited, conquering and exploiting it may be, and in turn the victim and torturer, slave and mistress, for what is basically represented by the metaphor of the house is the man subjected to power relations situational forced to ongoing social struggle, a depredation of space and a subjugation of the behaviors.

There is much in this thesis pinteriana disturbing, and very similar to the behavior of middle-class ways of oppression and colonization of space and identity theft. Fiction in fiction, drama in the theater, characters that follow the trick of a life ever lived, but that has to deal with the memory of others, tricks and other forms. In Betrayal (Betrayal , 1978) is lighter than elsewhere, since the scenes back in time, allowing you to capture the paradoxes of guilt, the executioner who becomes aware of the victim, while the experience each traitor (love, friendship and commitments) to be unable to contain the sense of the actions of the protagonist, the sense of the actions of others (lucky this drama was brought to the big screen by David Jones 1983, for the interpretation of Patricia Hodge, Jeremy Irons and Ben Kingsley).

Verbal violence is another feature of the work of Pinter, and acts as a relief to the linguistic and psychological and physical threat, as in the interrogation of The nightcap ( One for the Road, 1984). Sweetness, tenderness, threats, swear words, passivity, aggression, verbal insults are juxtaposed marking the strengths and weaknesses of the characters in their daily struggle, features that are found in the wonderful film by Joseph Losey's The Servant ( The Servant, 1963), scripted by Pinter, in which the attraction has a central role.

The exclusion of the other (El'autoesclusione himself inside the house), as has been noted, a theme that Jewish culture, and Pinter was born in London in 1930 to a Jewish family, re-use both hands, even reversing the situation, as it Birthday (The Birthday Party , 1957), in which two dark figures identify the home of the hero and try to take away with him out of the house, which belongs to the community. Walls sealed in the city and country divisions, autoghettizzazioni, exclusions from its own space through the plays of Pinter, making them of great interest, because they describe a culture (the characters) that extends the great issues of today, the work places of power, of the evolutionary differences of nations. How distinctly Jewish is the theme of a past that comes back pernicious, exclusion, elimination of the other.

Pinter's The themes are supported by a formal rigor that has few equals in contemporary English literature and drama in the highly successful British tradition. The use of a common language, cut the social types, which nevertheless produces sudden sentenzialità and manages to be crisp, the interlayer of the silences between the beats, the intimate dialogue scenes, the persistence of breaks congenial: far from reach alla denuncia sociale di Bernard Shaw, al lirismo visionario di Samuel Beckett, alla critica “epica” di Bertold Brecht o al grottesco di Tom Stoppard, ne sono la più equilibrata sintesi, con un dosaggio dei diversi meccanismi drammatici che fanno di Pinter un classico. Questo Nobel va a uno dei più grandi interpreti del Novecento, senza il quale verrebbe meno una storia letteraria, a prescindere dal Nobel stesso.

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[pubblicato in: Notizie in... Controluce , n. XIV/11, novembre 2005, p. 30 . ]