Editor’s Note

At long last, I am pleased to present this year’s issue of The Harold Pinter Review. Truth be told, it was a challenge to assemble this. And as I reflect on my conversations with colleagues and authors, it is clear to me that the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic still linger. During the past few years, faculty and students alike faced immense difficulties. Though many of us have returned to in-person teaching and research, we do so worn down from online teaching, added service requirements, and personal health concerns. Still, in such times, it is good to know that one has a community with whom to share mutual interests. This particular issue represents such a community, and it does so by publishing work that is both diverse in content and authorship. I am particularly pleased for this since our authors represent an international group of scholars that is committed to Harold Pinter’s enduring significance and to modern drama more broadly.Our three feature articles concern noteworthy topics. Basil Chiasson’s “Jane Stanton Hitchcock and Harold Pinter: The Case of Vanilla” is particularly significant since it is the only existing study on Pinter’s direction of the play. Drawing on, and including, an interview with its author, Jane Stanton Hitchcock, the essay argues that Vanilla influenced some of Pinter’s original writing. Farah Ali’s essay, “We Are Not Free, and the Sky Can Still Fall on Our Heads: Performing Torture in Harold Pinter’s The New World Order” considers Giorgio Agamben’s theory of “bare life” to examine the performativity of torture in the play. Finally, Maha Alatawi’s article, “‘For me to flourish you must be quiet’: Patriarchal Anguish in The Cordelia Dream and Lear’s Tragic Legacy” takes us away from Pinter Studies proper and into the world of comparative drama. In particular, the article investigates the complex dynamics of father-daughter relationships under patriarchy by offering a comprehensive analysis of Marina Carr’s play, The Cordelia Dream, and its relation to Shakespeare’s King Lear. It discusses how silencing women compares to the alienation that men experience in a society that appears to bestow all power to them. In the end, The Cordelia Dream is a thoughtful meditation on how patriarchy strips humanity of grace and empathy.It would not be an issue of The Harold Pinter Review without miscellaneous discoveries and commentary. Doug Phillips offers a review of The Homecoming as performed at the Young Vic in London from November 27, 2023–January 27, 2024. Directed by Matthew Dunster, the production featured David Angland, Joe Cole, Lisa Diveney, Robert Emms, Jared Harris, and Nicolas Tennant. Tim Dowley’s “Harold Pinter’s ‘Blood Sports’: A Precocious Precursor of Some of the Playwright’s Style and Themes” examines a piece penned by Pinter in 1947. First published in The Review—the termly magazine of his northeast London grammar school, Hackney Downs—the work has never since appeared in print. Dowley’s review of this early piece identifies a number of significant precursors of the playwright’s later distinctive style, vocabulary, and themes. Finally, we include proceedings from the 2024 Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture. This year, the International Harold Pinter Society sponsored two panels. The first engaged Hélène Cixous’s plays, attending to their critical portrayal of patriarchy and psychoanalysis. The second commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sarah Kane’s death by examining her relationship with Pinter.Though this particular issue may not be as robust as previous years, the topics presented in it bear witness to Pinter’s critical eye and humanitarian spirit. I hope that you find this issue thought-provoking, particularly since its pages underscore why it is necessary to resist, as Pinter did and still would, the conditions that precipitate genocide, international turmoil, and political oppression. Perhaps contained within these articles, papers, and reviews exist some modicum of insight that would restore “what is so nearly lost to us”: dignity.1