Expressionism and Harold Pinters Plays - Essay Example

Teacher 8 January 2008 Expressionism and Harold Pinter's Plays Introduction Harold Pinter has written many playsthroughout his continuing career, most of which are known for their ambivalent characters, ambiguous themes, dramatic pauses and overall meanings that are open to interpretation. Although Pinter never embraced any particular form of expressionism in his writing, the two could easily compliment one another if they were integrated properly. Expressionism can encompass a wide variety of art, including theatre, and in this context it is used to dramatise emotional changes within written characters on stage. Pinter's plays are of an unusual quality that lends itself quite easily to expressionistic interpretation. Expressionism and Theatre Expressionism is the term used to define many different pieces of artwork including paintings, sculptures, film and plays, that in some way distort reality for emotional effect. Painters can use expressionist techniques to blur solid lines, play with light or change the facial features on a portrait so that the viewer gets a real sense of the emotion of the piece; fear, despair, love (Murphy, 1999, 40). By working with expressionist techniques instead of using realism, many artists feel more capable of portraying the proper feeling of their pieces than if everything were to appear perfectly lifelike. Expressionism is meant to dig beneath a realistic surface and expose what lies beneath. In terms of the theatre, most early expressionist plays are credited to German playwrights of the early 20th century. Writers such as Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller were two of the most successful early expressionistic playwrights; their influence quickly spread to other countries including America where this style of theatre was considered very trendy in the 1920's (Valgamae, 1972, 1-15). Plays such as these relied heavily on the ability of the actors as they were often scripted to over-dramatise emotional states and to literalise metaphor; many expressionistic plays focused on the dramatisation of a protagonist's spiritual awakening or suffering. A good example of an expressionist play can be found in Oskar Kokoschka's 1909 Murderer, The Hope of Women. In this production, Kokoschka's characters remain unnamed throughout in an effort to focus the attentions of the audience to the more obscure themes. The Man and the Woman are engaged in a power struggle and during the course of the play Man brands Women, who in turn imprisons Man (1909). The entire play is set up as a purely connotative and emotional look at what might well be a normal relationship between a man and a woman. Like other expressionist forms of art, theatre focuses on the reality behind the everyday, and achieves this with the use of literalism, metaphor and hyperbole. Harold Pinter Pinter is an English playwright who has been active for several decades in various facets of the writing world. Aside from writing 29 well-received stage plays, he has written 26 screenplays and a myriad of radio and television plays as well as having acted on stage himself. Pinter began his writing career as a teenage poet, but soon found himself on stage; in the 1950's he enjoyed an acting career under the name David Baron but eventually writing overtook his desire to pursue acting. His playwriting is very unorthodox in both Pinter's approach as a writer and in its materialisation on stage; these plays earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 (Peacock, 1997, 13-33). Pinter has been politically active since he became a conscientious objector at 18; since then the writer has participated in the UK's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the British Anti-Apartheid Movement and the Playwright's in Apartheid Protest. He has been very active in International PEN (International Poets, Essayists and Novelists), a group of diverse writers from around the world who promote the use of literature in crossing cultural borders. Currently Pinter is a member of the Cuban Solidarity Campaign in the UK which supports the regime of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Harold Pinter has remained a controversial figure throughout his career, and it is from drawing upon his various experiences, beliefs and emotions that he is able to create such innovative characters and stories in his plays (Ibid.). Pinter's Style of Play Harold Pinter's first full-length stage play was The Birthday Party; an initial financial and critical flop, this play was revived and is currently the Pinter play with that has been produced the most. This is a prime example of the ambiguity with which Pinter writes and with which his characters are portrayed: the character Stanley, for whom the birthday party is being put together, denies that it is his birthday and says the woman who planned the party is crazy. Stan also refuses to be specific about his career, first stating that he has played piano all over the world, then the country, and then downgrading both statements to "I played a good concert once" (Pinter, 2006, 14). The character Goldberg is another ambiguous element in the play. Goldberg's identity is impossible to pin down as he is referred to by the names Benny, Simey and Nat in addition to Goldberg. With the use of these different names in relation to his stories, the audience cannot tell what events took place recently, in the past, or even who was present at the time. The Birthday Party is very characteristic of a Pinter play because of its ambiguity, the lack of any real characterisation and an overall need for the audience to draw their own conclusions and make of it what they will (Prentice, 2000, 23-24). Pinter does not try to create a solid plot or normal characters in his plays; he generally aims for a much less realistic stage experience and this is what he has become known for. It is because of this basic lack of reality and solid interpretation that Pinter's plays could so easily incorporate an expressionist slant. Combining Elements of Expressionism in Pinter's Plays Using The Birthday Party as an example, it is easy to see that Pinter has created a theatrical framework that could readily stand the addition of more expressionist writing. This play, and Pinter's plays in general, rely on loosely defined elements such as the characters, the history, even the plot itself. What Pinter has accomplished by writing in this style is to let the imagination of the audience run more freely than in other theatre productions so that they might all draw their own conclusions and come away with entirely different views than one another. More than anything, Pinter is able to show the various facets of human relationships, regardless of proper character names, dates or plot references. Expressionist theatre, such as Kokoschka's Murder, The Hope of Women, uses similar techniques however is more pointed in its emotive use. Where Pinter is already known for his use of dramatic pauses, purely expressionist writers will employ these as well as more vocal cues from the actors. Kokoschka's work was dependent on these factors, but also largely on the literal interpretations of metaphor in terms of the relationship between a man and a woman. Pinter's own writing contains many different facets of the relationships between different people; in fact this is cited as one of the most major elements in his work. If Pinter were to incorporate certain aspects into his plays, such as more dramatic speech sequences coupled with pauses, and to possibly incorporate even fewer structures into the writing (concrete setting, immobile characters) it would be a small leap to change something like The Birthday Party into an expressionist play. Pinter's work leaves the audience to draw their own conclusions and make their own interpretations of character motivation and even character emotions; an expressionist writer would create a very similar effect but with more emphasis on character struggles, emotions and particularly suffering, fear and epiphany (Innes, 1993, 158-168). To showcase these emotional breaking points, expressionist writers rely on their actors to properly convey those elements which Pinter has already called upon - the dramatic pause, the ambiguous timeframe and an uncertain aim - to a higher degree that is actually less open to interpretation. Conclusion Harold Pinter cannot be labelled as an expressionist playwright; one can, however, draw lines between his plays and those of expressionist writers. Pinter has been able to create and uphold his own genre of theatrical production, however with the incorporation of certain techniques such as dramatic vocalisation and less structured plots he would be able to portray a more expressionist piece of work that helps the audience to focus on the emotional elements as he sees fit. Expressionism is defined as an art form without rigidity; Pinter's work has been described similarly and if he were to add expressionist facets into his work the outcome would likely be very enjoyable. Bibliography Innes, C. 1993, Avant Garde Theatre, 1892-1992, Routledge, New York. Kokoschka, O. 1909, "Murderer, the Hope of Women". Murphy, R. 1999, Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England. Peacock, D.K. 1997, Harold Pinter and the New British Theatre, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT. Pinter, H. 2006, The Essential Pinter, "The Birthday Party", Grove P., New York, pp.15-102. Prentice, P. 2000, The Pinter Ethic: The Erotic Aesthetic, Garland, New York. Valgemae, M. 1972, Accelerated Grimace: Expressionism in the American Drama of the 1920s, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, IL. Read More