Editors’ Note: The Final Issue

Theatergoers have expectations. They expect to be engaged, entertained, surprised, gratified. They expect to find certain features in the production of plays written by familiar playwrights or playwrights with reputations bandied by critics and the press. Playwrights whose work sparks such expectations deliver what is expected in each production, slowly develop their styles, and, if the unexpected is expected, stage the unexpected. Some plays present and ask questions about existence and being. Some do the same with regard to human relations, their trials, upsets, and even victories. Some dramatize and comment on power politics across a range of dimensions from the individual and familial to international clashes, played out via characters. In all, theater is a staged commentary on human circumstances and relations—among characters on stage, between the stage and the audience, and in realms beyond the theater.Harold Pinter was a prolific writer, authoring plays (32), film screenplays (27), dramatic sketches (16), poetry, short stories, two novels, and multiple political screeds. His art challenged convention and baffled the public, critics, and even scholars only to become widely celebrated, enter the canon of classic work, and garner many awards, including three Tony Awards and a Nobel Prize in Literature. Pinter also acted in and directed plays and films. His knowledge of the acting profession informed his work, as Michael Gambon once said: “He knew about acting and his writing was so good because he knew about the process. [. . .] He was our God, Harold Pinter, for actors. He was the man who wrote the plays you wanted to be in” (Gambon qtd. in “Stars Mourning Playwright Pinter”). In reporting that “I was in English rep as an actor for about 12 years,” Pinter once divulged that his “favourite roles were undoubtedly the sinister ones. They’re something to get your teeth into” (Pinter qtd. in Gussow, Conversations with Pinter 83).According to John Haynes, “The dynamic in his work is rooted in battles for control, turf wars waged in locations that range from working-class boarding houses (in his first produced play ‘The Room,’ from 1957) to upscale restaurants (the setting for ‘Celebration,’ staged in 2000). His plays often take place in a single, increasingly claustrophobic room, where conversation is a minefield and even innocuous-seeming words can wound” (Haynes qtd. in “Harold Pinter Is Dead”). As Sunday Times critic Harold Hobson describes Pinter’s plays, “Though you go to the uttermost parts of the earth, and hide yourself in the most obscure lodgings in the least popular of towns, one day there is a possibility that two men will appear. They will be looking for you, and you cannot get away. And someone will be looking for them too. There is terror everywhere.” And he concludes, “Mr. Pinter, on the evidence of this work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London” (Hobson qtd. in “Harold Pinter Is Dead”).Beginning with The Room in 1957, Pinter developed a strange and unique take on the conventions of setting and dialogue whereby the “claustrophobic room” set and the encounters between and relations among the characters intermingled the familiar and the new. This emergent style demanded a lot from audiences but ultimately freed them so they might reexperience the theater. While not widely regarded as political, Pinter’s plays politicized the traditions and conventions of theater by revising and rejecting traditional form and content and teasing and challenging audience’s desires and expectations. At the same time, his drama was laying its own ground for future reconsideration as a critique of power, if not outright political drama. The Nobel Committee’s assertion in 2005 that Pinter’s drama “uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms” (Engdahl) was obviously attentive to how the playwright’s body of work ranges critically over the realms of language and inhabited space; while the acceptance speech Pinter delivered subsequently and from the confines of a wheelchair offered an insistent picture of the plays as having always been about power, specifically in the form of oppression, its constraint and resistance to it, as well as freedom.As with most great artists, Pinter’s work evolved through a process of retaining elements that worked while introducing new subjects, forms, and approaches. Pinter’s shift in both style and direction is notable because it was not straightforward: the period between the early 1980s to the end of Pinter’s career is an especially interesting slice of history, certainly because of changing directions and style, but also in the ways Pinter’s shift to what he called “more overtly political” writing—poems, essays, and screenplays that feature political content of some sort—is accompanied by plays, poems, and screenplays that do not fit comfortably under the label of political art. A “late” stage of dramatic output featuring the sketches Precisely and Press Conference and the plays Victoria Station, Family Voices, A Kind of Alaska, One for the Road, Mountain Language, The New World Order, Party Time, Moonlight, Ashes to Ashes, and Celebration makes plain Pinter’s varied focus, dynamism, and complexity. Furthermore, as much as Pinter’s political dramas and poems have tended to be demoted by critics, the public, and some scholars, close analysis reveals much of what Pinter was always doing, namely, the theatrical “grammar” we’ve already mentioned: the claustrophobic room and power struggles that are played out largely through the medium of language handled in Pinter’s singular way.So much has been written about Pinter’s work at this point that the focus on his later work and political orientation has now become conventional. Nevertheless, as history keeps on happening, we are sure to find even more and something new in Pinter’s plays and other work if we relate them to life in the era of Trump 2.0, the mainstreaming of reactionary politics, increasing drifts toward neopopulism, and so on. Now is a good time to remember observations made about Pinter around the time of his passing: statements about how “publicly outspoken” Pinter was in his views on repression and censorship, at home and abroad,” how attentive he was to effects the political past can have on the present (Haynes qtd. in “Harold Pinter Is Dead”), his “tremendous passion about injustice, things that had happened just recently,” the “extraordinary antenna” he had, and how “People, especially young people, picked up on it” (Tennant).The truth beyond art to which Pinter held fast as means of engaging in political and historical critique would now be framed in terms of debates over mis- and dis-information, about which Pinter would surely have much to say. At the same time, the creep of fascism into democratic politics and nations seems merely a more recent chapter in a book from which Pinter was always reading as both an artist and a citizen. Note how the following excerpt from the last dramatic piece Pinter ever wrote, a sketch entitled The Pres and an Officer, which Pinter’s wife discovered after his death, resonates with today’s political climate:Sponsored by the International Harold Pinter Society, The Harold Pinter Review has provided insight and commentary on modern theater, its contributions to ideas and culture, its changing practices, and, in this final issue, possible causes for the precarity and even increased absence of modern drama in higher education contexts.This scholarly journal has been published annually since 1987, first as The Pinter Review: Collected Essays and then over time as The Harold Pinter Review: Essays in Contemporary Drama. It has featured a range of essays from all over the world on the work of Harold Pinter and other modern dramatists. For more than 38 years, many scholars, along with the personnel at several academic presses, have contributed to the journal’s production. We would like to remember and thank the individuals who have stewarded and been most closely associated with the enterprise: the first and long-serving editors, Francis Gillen and the late Stephen H. Gale; Ann C. Hall, who took over and served as editor for a decade; Matthew Roberts, who served as guest editor for several years; and Judith Roof, who served as assistant editor. We’d like to acknowledge all those who have served as members of the editorial board: Katherine Burkman, Arka Chattopadhyay, Basil Chiasson, Baron Kelly, Lance Norman, Craig N. Owens, Matthew Roberts, Judith Roof, Graham Saunders, Marc Silverstein, Mark Taylor-Batty, and Stephen Watt. We’d like to acknowledge Lynn Hall, Lance Norman, and Judith Roof for their roles as treasurer and Lynn Hall for her work as book review editor. We’d also like to thank Susan Hollis Merritt, whose served as Bibliographical Editor for the journal from the 1980s to the early 2000s and whose tireless and meticulous work on “The Harold Pinter Bibliography” is remarkable and will always be one of the most serious contributions to Pinter scholarship. We would also like to thank the many, many contributors whose work appeared in the pages of the journal over the years.This final issue begins with a Forum, consisting of short essays authored by editorial board members, who were invited to reflect on both modern drama’s disappearance from contemporary academic study and the changes in academe that have contributed to the predicament.The Forum is followed by two critical articles. Mica Hilson’s “‘Please heed the pauses and silences in this play’: Analyzing Nonverbal Communication in the Works of Annie Baker and Harold Pinter” is the first publication to consider Pinter’s drama in relation to American playwright Annie Baker and two of her plays. Accounting for three Pinter plays and exposing us to the work and style of a much younger and quite different dramatist than Pinter, Hilson’s study hinges on each playwright’s use of pauses and silence as well as on what Hilson calls the “non-pause.” His study revisits Pinter’s use of these conventions as well as the familiar matter of communication breakdown in the plays only to connect the journey to Baker’s own approach to dramatizing nonverbal communication and the challenges of interpersonal and group communication. Ultimately using Pinter’s characters to help us appreciate Baker’s and Baker’s to appreciate Pinter’s, the essay builds on a long-running concern within Pinter scholarship with the psychology and outward behavior of Pinter’s characters and how verbal language cuts across and mediates both.Rıza Çimen’s “‘Welcome to the abattoir!’ Philip Ridley’s Gothic Pinteresque,” builds upon a yet nascent enquiry into the intersections between Pinter’s and Phillip Ridley’s drama. Çimen’s essay positions multiple Pinter plays in what he calls “an aesthetic dialogue” with Ridley’s work, namely his second stage play The Fastest Clock in the Universe, which premiered in 1992 and is part of what’s known as Ridley’s “East End Gothic Trilogy.” Working with the concept of ‘the gothic’ and focusing on the structure of the drama, the rhythms of the dialogue, and “the relationship between characters and the enclosed spaces they inhabit,” the essay illustrates how Ridley’s work “evokes Pinter’s fictional universe” but argues simultaneously that the “undercurrent” of a gothic aesthetic in Ridley’s play “complicates any straightforward reading of [the work] as purely Pinteresque.” Çimen ultimately depicts the “vibrant interplay” of the fusions and tensions he charts from Pinter’s to Ridley’s work as “a noteworthy example of positive influence,” an influence he regards as intertextual phenomena.The article contributions to this issue are followed by three reviews: Arka Chattopadhyay on a Bengali translation of a production of The Caretaker in Kolkata, India; Rajarshi Roy on an English translation of an anthology of Bengali plays by playwright Bratya Basu; and Judith Roof on a book about Pinter by British actor, poet, and playwright David Erdos.The issue concludes with a creative work, a play by David Erdos, which offers a paean to Harold Pinter.