scholarly journals Cringe Histories: Harold Pinter and the Steptoes

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
Jonathan Bignell
Keyword(s):  
Extended Period ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Dramatic Works ◽  
Harold Pinter ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Birthday Party ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
Theatre Of The Absurd

This article argues that cringe humour in British television had begun at least by the early 1960s and derived from a theatre history in which conventions of Naturalism were modified by emergent British writers working with European avant-garde motifs. The article makes the case by analysing the importance of cringe to the BBC sitcom Steptoe and Son, tracing its form and themes back to the ‘comedy of menace’ and ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ emblematised by the early work of playwright Harold Pinter. The article links the play that made Pinter’s reputation, The Birthday Party, to dramatic tropes and social commentary identified in Steptoe and Son and in other British sitcoms with cringe elements. The analysis not only discusses relationships between the different dramatic works on stage and screen but also pursues some of the other connections between sitcom and Pinter’s drama via networks of actors and contemporaneous discourses of critical commentary. It assesses the political stakes of cringe as a comic form, particularly the failure of cringe to impel political activism, and places this in the context of the repeated broadcast of Pinter’s plays and episodes of Steptoe and Son over an extended period.

scholarly journals A Postmodern Allegory: Absurdity in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-17
Author(s):  
Nynu V Jamal
Keyword(s):  
Harold Pinter ◽  
Birthday Party ◽  
Theatre Of The Absurd

The Birthday Party is an absurdist play written by the British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor Harold Pinter. He is one of the most celebrated dramatists of the Theatre of the Absurd. The objective of the paper is to examine how Pinter’s play The Birthday Party incorporates the elements of an absurdist play. The paper also tries to explain how the fragility of language to communicate is being portrayed through the play.

Theatre of the Absurd

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Y. Bennett
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Albert Camus ◽  
Jean Genet ◽  
Radio Drama ◽  
Edward Albee ◽  
Harold Pinter ◽  
Eugene Ionesco ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Theatre Of The Absurd

Coined and first theorized by BBC Radio drama critic Martin Esslin in a 1960 article and a 1961 book of the same name, the “Theatre of the Absurd” is a literary and theatrical term used to describe a disparate group of avant-garde plays by a number of mostly European or American avant-garde playwrights whose theatrical careers, generally, began in the 1950s and 1960s. Of the playwrights and writers (whether or not accurately) associated with this movement that has not been self-proclaimed, four were awarded Nobel Prizes in Literature: Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre (who refused the award). Other major playwrights associated with the absurd are Edward Albee, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet (among other important and minor playwrights). Often misconstrued as existentialist or nihilistic plays, they signaled the end of theatrical “modernism.” As such, some of these plays are considered among the most important and influential plays of the 20th century in their own right. As a group of plays, the Theatre of the Absurd, or known more casually as “absurd theater” or “absurd drama,” is widely considered, if not the most, certainly one of the most important theatrical movements of the second half of the 20th century. Besides leaving a treasure trove of important avant-garde plays, absurd drama and dramatists have left as possibly their greatest legacy, namely, that the tragicomic worldview of these plays has been subsumed by mainstream plays. Indeed, tragicomedy has become the default theatrical genre over the past five or so decades.

Beckett, Samuel Barclay (1906–89)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yan (Amy) Tang
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Dramatic Works ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
Waiting For Godot ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

Samuel Barclay Beckett is widely considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Born in Ireland and living in France for half of his life, he wrote prose, dramatic works, poems, and criticism in both English and French. He started to write fiction after he met James Joyce and other intellectuals in Paris in the 1920s. His research on languages, literature and philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin, and at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris provided a solid basis for his works. His popularity grew rapidly after the Second World War, particularly after the publication of his groundbreaking play, En attendant Godot (1953, Waiting for Godot), and his trilogy, Molloy (1951), Malone meurt (1951, Malone Dies), and L’innommable (1953, The Unnamable). He was not only a prolific modernist who innovated avant-garde prose, theatre, radio, television, and cinema; he also joined the French Resistance during the Second World War and the post-war reconstruction. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.

Harold Pinter, 1930–2008

2009 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-5
Keyword(s):  
Early Years ◽  
Harold Pinter ◽  
Birthday Party

The death of Harold Pinter on 24 December 2008, at the age of seventy-eight, has prompted an inevitable slew of respectful obituaries, and the facts about his life and opinions are available in plenty. Here, we print two personal recollections of Pinter's early years – from Charles Marowitz, who, as an editor of Encore magazine, saw The Birthday Party into print in 1959 while the play was still enduring critical scorn, and Simon Trussler, co-editor of NTQ, who published one of the first studies of Pinter's plays, and, with Marowitz, edited Theatre at Work (Methuen, 1967), which included the earliest lengthy interview with the playwright.

Microhistory in the Middle East: The Case of Ibn Dāniyāl

2013 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-95
Author(s):  
Marvin Carlson
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Dramatic Works ◽  
Important Challenge

The recently rediscovered dramatic works of a major thirteenth-century Egyptian author, Muhammad Ibn Dāniyāl, provides a striking example of how the strategies of microhistory can provide an important challenge to, and possible reassessment of, the grand narratives that theatre history has often accepted without serious question. Ibn Dāniyāl is an excellent example of the sort of outsider that has attracted the attention of microhistorians, one of those “peoples who would be left out by other methods.”

Cover Girls

Mulata Nation ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 106-149
Author(s):  
Alison Fraunhar
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
International Travel ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
National Symbols ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Republican Era ◽  
Popular Magazine ◽  
Magazine Covers

This chapter studies in the interweaving of popular and fine art forms during the Republican era, focusing on artwork of popular magazine covers and avant-garde painters of the period, with particular analysis of the work of several well-known (and several less so) painters and illustrators. In the chapter, the two formal approaches are connected by the deployment of the mulata in many of the artworks and illustrations. These artworks, fine and popular, were crucial in shaping consensus through vernacular imagery and well known national symbols, particularly (but not exclusively) the mulata. Both graphic and fine artists were shaped by international travel and residence abroad, introducing them to international stylistic currents against and through which they generated images that resonated with national identity. Not only did artists travel, but tourism continued to rise, bring foreign tastes, further shaping culture on the island. In addition to international connections, artists were at the vanguard of important political activism against corrupt government.

Shingeki

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John D. Swain
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Dramatic Works ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sharp Distinction ◽  
Meiji Period ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
New Theater ◽  
Tsubouchi Shoyo

Shingeki (literally "new theater") is a word coined in late Meiji period Japan (1868–1912) referring to dramatic works and theater performance styles imported and adapted from late 19th- and early 20th-century Europe. Almost every Japanese theatre form created in the 20th and 21st centuries is influenced by shingeki, but after the 1960s it was no longer a term associated with the avant-garde. Shingeki existed as a distinct theatrical genre for just over a decade in the late Meiji and early Taisho (1912–1926) periods; however, its legacy remains in Japanese theater. During the Meiji period’s rapid modernization and Westernization kabuki and nō presentational forms were criticized; naturalist and realist staging by playwrights such as Ibsen, Chekhov, and Hauptmann were promoted; and the view of dramatic texts as literature rather than as a springboard for an actor’s virtuosity became dominant. During the first decades of the 20th century writers such as Tsubouchi Shōyō (1858–1935) and Osanai Kaoru (1881–1928) sought to create a sharp distinction between premodern and modern forms of performance. The result was shingeki.

scholarly journals Comedy of Menace in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party Instructor: Basaad Maher Mhayyal

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (7) ◽  
pp. 47-64
Author(s):  
م. بسعاد ماهر محيل
Keyword(s):  
Communication Failure ◽  
Harold Pinter ◽  
Birthday Party ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
Boarding House ◽  
Unique Style

Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1957) clearly portrays the condition of modern man where there is a real communication failure among the characters. Through this play, Pinter tries his best to reflect this fact. He uses a lot of pauses and silences, i.e., the usage of language is no more significant to modern man. Pinter considers silence to be more powerful than the words themselves. That’s why long and short pauses can be seen throughout all Pinter’s plays. Modern man has been living in a state of alienation. All the characters are isolated by their own desire not to communicate with each other and to lock themselves away from the world. They are unable to express their feelings. Therefore modern man has buried himself in life just like the character of )Stanley( in this play who has buried himself in the boarding house in an attempt to be away from his own society after being rejected as a pianist by the people of that society. The play deals with human deterioration and the process of death. The disaster in the play does not lie in the idea of death, but in the more terrible state of being dead in life, as in )Stanley(’s case, who hides himself in a room ceasing all his relationships with life outside. This paper deals with Harold Pinter as a well-known British playwright who has his own unique style that is called Pinteresque, his language, and how he uses silences and pauses in his play The Birthday Party. It consists of an abstract, Pinter’s comedy of menace, his play The Birthday Party, and a conclusion

scholarly journals Theatre Sound Archiving in the Netherlands: Study and Re-Use of ‘Sleeping’ Sound Collections

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 36-45
Author(s):  
Ricarda Franzen
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Future Projections ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Types Of Knowledge

A number of recent publications feature thoughts on the neglect of the ‘unheard’ (Søndergaard, 2013) and the ‘buried’ (Hoffmann, 2015) sound archive. This article explores what types of knowledge sound archives might hold. To that end it moves between past and present when considering certain shared programmatic intents: examining future projections refl ected in the founding rationale of a specifi c Dutch theatre sound archive (Theater Instituut Nederland or TIN) in particular, while reviewing the rhetoric of ‘neglect’ and ‘re-use’ in current sound scholarship in general. Examining how the TIN archive refl ects the birth of an often quoted Dutch avant-garde theatre movement, the article seeks to address how sound documents might contribute to rethinking aspects of theatre history and perhaps aspects of historiography in general.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document