Betrayal Harold Pinter9/19/2020
That role has been taken by Stanley, the only boarder of the house, who has been there for a year.His first plays, with their dingy, working-class settings and surface naturalism, seemed to link Pinter with this group, but only the surface of his plays is naturalistic; most of a Pinter play takes place beneath the surface.
![]() Like Kafka, Pinter portrays the absurdity of human existence with a loving attention to detail that creates the deceptive naturalism of his surfaces. The language of his characters, bumbling, repetitive, circular, is actually more realisticmore like actual human speechthan the precise and rhetorically patterned dialogue found in what is considered to be realistic drama. Yet that actual language of human beings, when isolated on the stage, underlines the absurdity of human aspirations and becomes both wonderfully comic and pathetic as it marks the stages of human beings inability to communicate what is most important to them. Pinter, however, is more than an accurate recorder of speech; he is also a poet. The language of his characters, for all of their inarticulateness, is finally profoundly communicative of the human condition. What makes Pinter one of the most important modern British dramatists is his consummate skill as a dramatist; the fact that in language and pattern he is a poet, especially a poet of contemporary language, both its spoken expression and its expressive silences; and his existential insight into human beings place in the universe, which connects him with the most profound writers and thinkers of his time. The play is set in a single small room, the characters warm and secure within but threatened by cold and death from without. The Room is overtly symbolic, more so than Pinters later work, but the setting and characters are, for the most part, realistic. Rose sits in the cheap flat making endless cups of tea, wrapping a muffler around her man before she lets him go out into the cold; her husband, Bert, drives a van. Under the naturalistic veneer, however, the play has a murky, almost expressionistic atmosphere. She opens the door, and there, waiting to come in, is the new generation, a young couple named Mr. Mrs. Sands (the sands of time Mr. Sandss name is Tod, which in German means death). They are looking for an apartment and have heard that Roses apartment is empty. This room is occupied, she insists, obviously upset at this premonition of her departure. She imagines it to be wet and cold there, a place where no one would stand much of a chance. He comes in. He is a black manthe color of deathand he is blind, tapping in with his stick, blind as death is when claiming its victims from the ranks of the good or the bad. Roses husband comes in at this moment, shrieks Lice and immediately attacks the man, tipping him out of his chair and kicking him in the head until he is motionless. On the naturalistic level of the play, the action seems motivated by racist hatred, perhaps, but at the symbolic level, Bert seems to have recognized death and instinctively engages it in battle, as later Pinter characters kick out violently against their fate. It is, however, to no avail: Rose has been struck blind, already infected by her approaching death. Critics have objected to the heavy-handedness, the overt symbolism, of the blind black man, and characters with similar roles in later plays are more subtly drawn. The scene once more is restricted to a single room, the dining room of a seedy seaside guesthouse. Meg, the landlady, and Petey, her husband, who has a menial job outside the hotel, resemble Rose and her husband of The Room.
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