Pinter, Beckett, Shaw, Wilde

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Data:	01.06.2007
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PINTER
- The Dumb Waiter: 2 killers are sent by mysterious organization to a basement room to kill someone that they do not know and who, in the end, turn up to be one of the 2.
THEMES
Pinter’s plays belong essentially to the Theatre of the Absurd and his most important predecessors are Kafka and Beckett. Like theme he re-proposes recurrent themes in his works:
- The menace: there is always something threatening in Pinter’s plays, especially in the early ones which, for this reason, have also been called “ Comedies of menace”. The Nature of this menace is vague and can be identified with:
. haunting past memories;
. distressing news from outside;
. mysterious calls or knocking on the door;
. the threat of racial persecutions and intolerance;
. the threat of an impending cosmic disaster;
. an immediate menace physical violence.
The menace in Pinter’s place is connected with the alienation that seems to mark the modern world.
- The room : this theme is common to at least 8 of Pinter’s place, despite P. himself’ s claim not to be a symbolist dramatist, it may actually work as a symbol. Always provided with an opening towards the outside, through which the menacing something can intrude the room may in turn symbolize.
. a refuge;
. a safe haven;
. a sort of motherly womb protecting from the outer world;
. a status symbol;
. a sort of property;
. a kind of prison;
- The intruder : intrusion may actually take place either physically ( in the persons of unexpected strangers, relatives, friends or potential enemies), or metaphorically ( in the form of hallucinations, memories, possessive attitudes, etc) in both cases disturbing real or pretended tranquillity.
- False identity : some of Pinter’s characters often produce false names or have more than one name.
- Blindness:
. end of a relationship;
. fear of life;
. fear of sexuality;
. failure of any sort
. death
- Mistrust in family ties;
- Mistrust in human relationships: there is no room for true friendship or love, because they are marred by suspicion, fear and violence
- Failure to recollect the past;
- Inability to communicate : Pinter’s characters in ordinary conversation are incapable of achieving it , since they do not share the same level of intelligence, or they are so stupid that communication is virtually impossible anyway.
- Solitude: ( in comune con Beckett)
- Deception and elusiveness ;
- Reality and Unreality: this theme is more frequent. He says that there is no hard distinction between what is real and what is unreal
In conclusion we can say that at the centre of Pinter’s plays is the existential meaninglessness of life.
One of his abilities is his skill in reproducing the surface of life, its insignificant and repetitive events.
His work is very English in its use of understatement, employing the conventional cliches of everyday speech.
LANGUAGE AND STYLE
Despite Beckett’s influence, which is evident in such devices as repetitions, banalities and inconsistencies.
He never destroys the normal syntactic structure of the sentences, but manages, all the same, to attain ambiguity through the evasiveness of the character’s answers, the imprecision of their memories.
His dialogues borrow from everyday life a realistic language., made up of trivial remarks, syntactic mistakes and repetitions, but also of allusive hints, jokes and meaningless details.
Important and revealing are the pauses and the long silence intersersed throughout the plays. “ There are 2 silences: One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is employed”.
Samuel BECKETT
Life and works: Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin. He studied French and Italian. When he received the degree he taught in Belfast. In 1928 he went to Paris and here he met James Joyse with he formed a lasting friendship. In 1930 he returned to Dublin as assistant to the professor of Romance Languages at Trinity College. However he soon left the routine of his academic career and he travelled in France, Germany, Ireland, and London for five years, and eventually he stayed in France. In 1940 when was occupied by the Germans, Beckett joined a Resistance group. After some of his friends were arrested, he fled and found shelter in a farm near Avignon.
He wrote many novels, but the most important is Waiting for Godot(1955). This novel represents the Theatre of the Absurd, which he revolutionised drama, and he had a great influence on later dramatists. He the Nobel Prize in 1969. He died in 1989.
The plot: Divided in two acts, Beckett’s play presents two protagonist: Vladimir, called Didi, and Estragon called Gogo. They wait a mysterious person called Godot.
Estragon and Vladimir are angry because they probably have a appointment with Godot, who appears the only solution for escape from their situation.
Initially, they pass the time speculating on the reasons for their condition and their chances of being saves. They also experiment briefly with the idea of killing themselves.
Than, the conversation becomes disjointed and fragmented. The dialog become absurd and the characters engage a misunderstood jokes and absurd word-play.
The monotony is briefly interrupted by three figures: Pozzo, and his servant, Lucky. Pozzo keeps Lucky with a rope. Than appear, in the scene a boy with a massage saying that Godot will arrive the next day.
In the second act the dialog is absurd like in the first act. Pozzo remembers nothing of their meeting the precedent day. The boy also returns with a new message saying that Godot will arrive the next day, but he, too, claims never to have met Vladimir and Estragon.
At the end Vladimir and Estragon, considerate again the idea of killing themselves.
Characters without a role: The play hasn’t real story and also the characters don’t know their identity. They haven’t a real personality and often lost their memory.
In this play there is a sense of sterility because in the scene there are only men. Besides the characters take on different interpretation: Pozzo represents the master and than the capitalistic world, while Lucky represent the worker world. In the Freudian key Pozzo is the body while Lucky is the intellect.
Beckett uses an elaborate language: in a some cases the language is simple but in other cases the language have a double sense.
The play is comic but also tragic. In fact in some cases the scenes are comic. For example Estragon, while he was speaking, put down himself the trouser.
In other cases the play is tragic because Vladimir and Estragon have the idea of killing themselves. Besides the scenes develops under a three, a weeping willow. The three represent a pessimistic vision.This play is called “tragicomedy”.
The figure of Godot: Godot is a character that he never appears. Some critics think that Godot represents God, but Beckett himself rejected this interpretation. In a speech a characters says that God will punish them. In this case Godot forgets God in the old testament. If Godot will arrive the characters are save. An other interpretation is this: in a sense Godot can be paralleled with the idea of the “ending”, a next catastrophe. In fact in this period there is the “Cold War”.
OSCAR WILDE (1854 - 1900)
Was born in Dublin in 1845. He was influenced by aestheticism and even more by decadentism. From aestheticism he took the cult of beauty, which must be associated with art. In particular the concept take "Art for Art's Sake", taken from Pater, led him to believe that only "Art as the cult of Beauty" could prevent the murder of the soul. Role of the artist: Wilde perceived the artist as an alien in a materialistic world. He wrote only to please himself and not to communicate his theories to his fellow beings, in fact he doesn't believe, on the contrary of the writers of the Enlightenment, in a didactic and moral aim for art. His pursuit of beauty is the tragic act of a superior being, inevitably turned into an outcast. The Wildean man-ideal is the dandy, which is an aristocratic whose elegance is a symble of the superiotity of his spirit and he is an individualist, who demands absolute freedom. Dorian Gray, the protagonist of the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is the typical dandy, in fact he thinks that life should be lived in his full and he belives in beauty, elegance and youth, which is synonimous with beauty and happiness. Plot: Dorian Gray is a young man whose beauty fascinates a painter, Basil Hallward, who decides to portray him. While Gray's desires are satisfied, including that of the eternal youth, the signs of age, experience and vice appear on the portrait. When the painter sees the corrupted image of the portrait, Dorian kills him. Later Dorian wants to free himself of the portrait, witness to his spiritual corruption, and stabs it, but he mysteriousely kills himself. In the moment of the death the picture returns to its original purity and Dorian's face becomes "withered, wrinkled and loathsome". Allegory meaning: this story is profoundly allegorical and it is a 19th century version of the myth of th Faust, the story of a man who sells his soul to the devil so that all his desires might be satisfied. In this novel the soul becomes the picture, which records the signs of experience, corruption, horror, concealed under the mask of Dorian timeless beauty. The picture stands for the dark side of Dorian's personality, which he tries to forget by locking the picture in a room. The orrible, corrupting picture could be seen as a symbol of the immorality and bad coscience of the Victorian middle classes, while Dorian's purity and innocence are symbols of the bourgeois hypocrisy. Finally the picture, restored to his original beauty, illustrates Wilde's theories of art: art survives people, art is eternal. The moral of this novel is that every excess must be punished and reality cannot be escaped, in fact when Dorian destroys the picture, he cannot avoid the punishment for all his sins, that is death. The play The importance of Being Earnest is a satire on the hypocritical society of that time. Its plot is based on a lie and the story continues through a series of misunderstandings based on Jack pretending to be Earnest. When Jack was a child, he was found in a black leather handbag in the cloak- room at Victorian Station by Mr. Worthing, an old gentleman who adopted him and gave him his own name. Now Jack lives in the country, but he often go to London on the pretext of visiting a fictious brother, Ernest. While in London, he falls in love with Gwendolen, whose mother, Lady Bracknell, opposes to their marriage for Jack's unknown origins. Instead Algernon, Jack's friend, lives in London, but he often go to the country on the pretext of visiting a fictious friend and there he falls in love with Cecily. Interpretations : this play is a satire of Victorian society, starting from the lack of earnestess of the protagonist and investing all the pillars of the Victorian society, that are marriage, church, respectability and the role of sexes. Irony: the comical effect and the irony are obtained by the use of paradox and wit.
Oscar Wilde (1856-1900)
In the last decade of the 19th century, literary London was scandaliseb by an Irishman, Oscar Wilde, a disciple of aestheticism, whose slogan was "art for art's sake", a socialist and an open antagonist of the prevailing moral and religious code. He was born in Dublin in 1856 into an upper middle-class family. After attending Portora Royal School, one of the best Protestant schools in Ireland, Wilde went to Trinity College, Dublin, and then won a scholarship to Oxford University where he took an honours degree in classics. At Oxford, he lived as a "dandy": he created the image of eccentricity which was later to inspire both bigoted disapproval and bewildered admiration in London society. He dressed extravagantly and paid great attention to the elegance of his lodgings. His conversation was brilliant and full of memorable witticism. The image of himself that he created was based on the belief that in life, as in art, the artist's duty was to cultivate beauty and give aesthetic pleasure. In 1888 he published a volume of fairy-stories written for his children, The Happy Prince and Other Tales. In the same period he wrote The Canterville Ghost and Lord Arthur Savile's Crime. Especially succesful was The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), a short novel combining goticism with aestheticism. It tells the story of a "fallen" dandy who corrupts all the people who fall under his spell, murders the friend who acts as the voice of Gray's conscience and finally punishes himself by committing suicide. The book caused a scandal but sold very well. His trial for homosexuality and his subsequent imprisonment saddened the last part of his life. The epistle De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol belong to this sad period. Today his literary reputation has been assessed on the basis of his artistic merit because homosexuality has ceased to be a crime or a source of scandal. With comic flat characters Wilde displays his best talent as a playwright.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
George Bernard Shaw was a leading figure in British drama for over fifty years. He was born in Dublin in 1856, into a family with aristocratic connections but in steady decline because of his father's alcoholism. At the age of sixteen the family's poverty, which was a source of great frustration to him, obliged him to take a job in an office. At the age of twenty he followed his mother to London. Working as a journalist he earned a living in London. He was interested beside literature in music and in art and theatre criticism. His first literary works - novels serialised in magazines - were a failure. He then turned to the theatre. He wanted to emulate the achievement of Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian dramatist. Ibsen's plays, which exposed the hypocrisy and corruption of the middle class, convinced him that art was "the most effective instrument of moral propaganda". He called Ibsen a social reformer, misunderstanding his main theme which was the psychological conflict between one's duty to society and one's duty to oneself. In his first plays he showed a corrupt ruling class prospering by exploiting the lower classes. Shaw started writing plays because he believed in the stage as a powerful force for awakening people's social conscience. He wrote about fifty plays. Critics have often attacked Shaw for putting social propaganda before dramatic art in his early plays. His characters are brilliant orators but lack the warmth of human beings. He had few imitators as a dramatist but helped to pave the way for the modern theatre of ideas. He developed a new kind of dramatic prose which is clear, vigorous and witty. In 1898 Shaw married Charlotte Payne Townsend, a well-to-do Irish woman who provided him with the personal and financial security necessary to devote himself exclusively to writing. In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Although he never renounced his socialist creed (in 1884 he had joined the Fabian Society), in the 1920s and 1930s he expressed admiration for totalitarian leaders like Mussolini and Hitler.
PIGMALION
Like all of Shaw's great dramatic creations, Pygmalion is a richly complex play. It combines a central story of the transformation of a young woman with elements of myth, fairy tale, and romance, while also combining an interesting plot with an exploration of social identity, the power of science, relations between men and women, and other issues.
Pygmalion is one of Shaw's most popular plays as well as one of his most straightforward ones. The form has none of the complexity that we find in Heartbreak House or Saint Joan, nor are the ideas in Pygmalion nearly as profound as the ideas in any of Shaw's other major works. It can be considerated an issue of language.
This play was written by George Bernard Shaw in 1912, presents a comic Edwardian version of the classical myth about Pygmalion, legendary sculptor and King of Cyprus, who fell in love with his own statue of Aphrodite. At his prayer, Aphrodite brought the statue to life as Galatea. George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion is the story of Henry Higgins, a master phonetician, and his mischievous plot to pass a common flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, off as a duchess at the Embassy Ball. In order to achieve his goal, Higgins must teach Eliza how to speak properly and how to act in upper-class society. The play looks at middle class morality and upper-class superficiality, and reflects the social ills of nineteenth century England, and attests that all people are worthy of respect and dignity.
Shaw is a British socialist who sympathized with the lower classes. Shaw criticized that the way of speaking of a person reveals his the social class of the people.