how does the British playwright Harold Pinter uses pause in his plays?

Question

Harold Pinter is the best living British dramatist. he is now suffering from cancer.

Answer 1

PInter won the Nobel Prize for Literature two years ago so somebody must think he is good. But I have heard him described as "a minor talent with a major reputation" and I rate Edward Bond and John Arden as the major talents of that generation. With Peter Shaffer not far behind

Pauses in Pinter tend to be used to convey rhythm, often laced with menace. It his strong suit. Take the scene in The Birthday Party where Goldberg and McCann grill Stanley, for example. What they say is jumbled nonsense (Albegenesist Heresy etc) but hard to reply to as it has an insistent rhythm to it, hard to break in on,

In the earlier scene where Meg fails to engage Petey's interest in a conversation about cornflakes and whether they are nice or not, seems to me Pinter is being observant about how boring people with nothing much to say, make half-hearted attempts to communicate but their lives are so humdrum they have to pause to think of something worth saying on the mundane topics they choose and soon lapse in the ardour with which they converse.

Not a particularly important topic to dramatise, I have to say, but Pinter has a good ear for speech patterns and rhythms and makes them passably interesting, though their content is not.

Answer 2

Pinter's pauses are often misunderstood, and part of the reason there are so many bad productions of Pinter plays.

The pauses happen when a character decides not to say something. Pinter characters often talk around the situation, rather than dealing with it directly. To my mind, the pauses happen when someone has something very specific to say about the situation or the conflict - but chooses to remain silent instead.

Answer 3

I believe it was merely because regular people take irregular pauses in their natural patterns of speech and it was just how he wrote. Not meant to be something that people made such a big deal out of but rather a natural way of writing speech.

:-)