Abstract
Assumptions concerning temporal continuity constitute part of the basis on which we form a critical attitude towards the drama.1 The force which turned Aristotle’s descriptive account of the representation of time on stage into a prescriptive formula is still strong, and despite the advent of cinema and television and the subsequent effect of those media on the perception of dramatic time, many audiences still believe that a stage play ought to limit itself to the unfolding of a plot in sequential order over a given period of time.
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Notes
Paul Ricoeur has argued convincingly in Time and Narrative: Volumes I, II and III (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983–1988) that although concepts of time and causation in western literature can be traced to two main sources, St Augustine’s Confessions and Aristotle’s Poetics, it is impossible to measure their influence in this century without the mediation of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Perhaps the most significant Heideggerian concept as far as Pinter is concerned is the inseparability of time and being.
This is despite Jarry’s unusual attitude to time. See, for example, Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor (eds), Selected Works of Alfred Jarry (New York: Grove Press, 1965) — especially ‘Visions of Present and Future’ and ‘How to Construct a Time Machine’. As far as Strindberg is concerned, this is true even of a play such as The Ghost Sonata, in which time is a significant theme. When the Old Man warns that the clock tells us when our time is up, Mummy replies by stopping the clock’s pendulum and saying ‘But I can halt time.’ All such effects in Strindberg’s plays, symbolic or otherwise, are specifically indicated by the dialogue or stage directions, while the time schemes follow a natural forward progression.
The characteristic Beckett and Pinter pauses soon became an object of parody for actors at the BBC, who, bemused by the sudden profusion of pauses in many of the plays they were rehearsing, did not have any idea of the length of those pauses. Pinter, following Beckett’s example, decided to use dots instead, and according to Alun Owen became very excited about the changeover. His later claim that The Caretaker was a success and The Birthday Party a failure because the former employed dots rather than dashes is a jab at theatre critics, but partly at his own expense since such matters were clearly of no little importance to him. See Ian Rodger, Radio Drama (London: Macmillan, 1982), especially Chapter 8: ‘The Discovery of Silence’.
Colin Duckworth (ed.), En Attendant Godot (London: George Harrap, 1966) p. xxxiii.
Andrew Kennedy, Six Dramatists in Search of a Language (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975) p. 172.
Shepard, Sam Shepard: Seven Plays (London: Faber & Faber, 1974) p. 203.
My line of argument on both Shepard and Mamet derives in part from C.W.E. Bigsby, who also quotes these two songs. However, Bigbsy is primarily concerned with the question of Shepard’s style than his attitude to temporality. See C.W.E. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth Century American Drama: Volume III — Beyond Broadway (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985) pp. 235–6.
Mel Gussow, ‘The Daring Visions of Four New, Young Playwrights’, The New York Times (30 November 1977) p. 13.
Mamet, New York Times (16 October 1977) D7.
Ian Watson, Conversations with Alan Ayckbourn (London: Faber & Faber, 1988) p. 84.
Howard Brenton, Christie in Love and Other Plays (London: Methuen, 1970) prefatory note.
Simon Trussler (ed.) New Theatre Voices of the Seventies: Sixteen Interviews from Theatre Quarterly, 1970–1980 (London: Methuen, 1981) p. 175.
The title of Dohmen’s article promises slightly more than it renders, but nevertheless provides an interesting look at the subject. Dohmen’s article can be found in Steven H. Gale (ed.), Harold Pinter: Critical Approaches (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1986) while Austin Quigley’s article is in The Pinter Review, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1987).
John Peter’s Vladimir’s Carrot: Modern Drama and the Modern Imagination (London: Methuen, 1988) examines the work of a number of the major philosophers and novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to provide a framework of ideas behind the drama. L.A.C. Dobrez, in his The Existential and Its Exits (London: Athlone Press, 1986) suffers from spending too little time on the texts and too much on the background. Nevertheless, the book helps to provide some important links between major playwrights and the philosophical context in which they wrote. Katherine H. Burkman’s book, The Arrival of Godot: Ritual Patterns in Modern Drama (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1986), provides a fascinating discussion of many of the issues only tangentially touched upon here, especially in the realms of comparative psychology and religion.
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© 1995 Martin S. Regal
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Regal, M.S. (1995). Conclusion. In: Harold Pinter. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371484_7
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