Ans. Harold Pinter is often linked with the so-called ‘New Wave’ of the British dramatists who came to prominence after 1956. These young dramatists are John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and John Arden. Pinter comes from a working-class background and started to write plays in the mid-1950s. It is probable that Pinter came under the influence of the writers of the absurd drama like Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee, Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco. Many of these dramatists present their audiences with characters stripped of all non-essentials such as decent clothes, employment, a routine of family life, in an attempt to reduce man to his basic nature. According to them, man is a hollow shell and life has no meaning. Seeing in this light, man’s life is absurd because it is totally without purpose.

This theme need not necessarily be gloomy, as the dramatist’s point is often that life is only meaningless because its basic nature is not understood. If human beings could only face up to the fact that they were alone in the universe with no divine purpose to their lives, then a realistic mode of living could be thought out. However, it is true to say that most of the absurd dramatists show their audience the meaninglessness of life, but give little idea of there being any hope for a new life.

The absurd dramatists believed that life was not rational; that it did not follow any laws or logical pattern. They were revolutionary in the sense that they transferred this irrationality to the stage. Their plays often have no plot as such, make a nonsense of chronology, and contain obscure or unexplained incidents. Plays of this type were a great shock to audiences when they were first performed. They obeyed none of the laws of conventional drama, and because absurdity is amusing, the plays were frequently very comic. Nor were these plays about something, in the sense of having a specific moral to them. Instead they were capable of widely differing interpretations.

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot has been seen as a play about religion, as a criticism of capitalism, and a play about German- occupied France in the Second World War, to name but a few views.

The similarities between this style of drama and Pinter’s plays such as The Caretaker are clear. The Caretaker is a comic play. It leaves the audiences confused about the origins of characters and the truth of what they say; it shows behavior that can appear absurd and pointless, and are open to many different interrelations.

The differences are also there in the sense that Pinter’s plays are more tightly constructed, psychologically more probing, and closer to real life in what they portray. However, Pinter has admitted that Beckett was a major influence on his writing, and no student of Beckett can avoid reading Waiting for Godot.

However, Pinter is no mere disciple of Beckett. His plays have their own distinctive “voice” and method. Three examples will serve to show this: first Pinter’s characters and situations, although, strange at first sight, are more psychologically realistic than Beckett’s are; secondly, he is more concerned than Beckett to show that menace exists even in the most domestic of context; thirdly, he is less concerned with abstract philosophical issues than Beckett is.