The Caretaker - 11LIT - Drama "The Importance of Being Earnest" & "The Caretaker"

Harold Pinter Biography

Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, (born Oct. 10, 1930, London, Eng.—died Dec. 24, 2008, London), English playwright, who achieved international renown as one of the most complex and challenging post-World War II dramatists. His plays are noted for their use of understatement, small talk, reticence—and even silence—to convey the substance of a character’s thought, which often lies several layers beneath, and contradicts, his speech. In 2005 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Harold Pinter's Literary Works

Harold Pinter's Plays
Pinter went on to write a number of absurdist masterpieces including The Caretaker, The Homecoming, Betrayal, Old Times, and Ashes to Ashes. He also composed a number of radio plays and several volumes of poetry. His screenplays include The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Last Tycoon, and The Handmaid's Tale. He received numerous awards including the Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear, BAFTA awards, the Hamburg Shakespeare Prize, the Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or, the Commonwealth Award and the Nobel Prize for Literature. His sparse style and gift for creating tension and horror through the most economic of means made him one of the most respected playwrights of his day.

Featured Books

Harold Pinter by Bill Naismith
Call Number: 822.914 PIN
Publication Date: 2000
Harold Pinter plays 2 by Harold Pinter
Call Number: Overdrive
Publication Date: 2013
eBook of plays 1, 2 & 3 & 4.
To access the eBook go to Library portal>eBooks>Overdrive>enter your SmartRider #>Search box "The Caretaker".
The Caretaker by Harold Pinter
Call Number: 822.914 PIN
Publication Date: 1983
Pinter the Playwright by Esslin Martin
Call Number: 822.914 PIN
Publication Date: 1991
Published to coincide with Pinter's 70th birthday, the sixth edition of Martin Esslin's acclaimed text has been revised and expanded to cover his more recent works. The book presents a comprehensive survey, spanning the whole of Harold Pinter's writing career - from his cooly received debut The Birthday Party, to his works that earned him the moniker Britain's best living playwright.

Featured Websites

HAROLD PINTER 1930-2008 - A TALE OF TWO LIVES.
The article discusses phases in the career of playwright Harold Pinter. The author comments that Pinter ceased to write plays in favor of promoting anti-American propaganda. He suggests that Pinter espoused no political viewpoints in plays such as "The Birthday Party," "The Homecoming" and "The Caretaker" but instead focused on the relationship of reality to illusion.
Harold Pinter
The Caretaker, generally considered to be Pinter’s greatest play, is in many ways an even more complex permutation of the elements that were developed in his first few plays. Though The Caretaker is much more realistic on the surface than the earlier plays and has much less overt violence, it retains its tie with absurdist theater in the fact that it readily lends itself to allegorical interpretation.
The Caretaker By: Johnson, Jeff, Masterplots, Fourth Edition,
Pinter’s second full-length play, The Caretaker, opened in London in 1960 and, after a twelve-month run, moved to Broadway, where it was acclaimed as a critical, if not commercial, success. The Caretaker has been described as Pinter’s most naturalistic play. The British theater critic Kenneth Tynan called it “a play about people,” which, in Pinter’s case, marked a significant turn in his approach to theater.
Theatre of the Absurd
Theatre of the Absurd, dramatic works of certain European and American dramatists of the 1950s and early ’60s who agreed with the Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus’s assessment, in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942), that the human situation is essentially absurd, devoid of purpose. The term is also loosely applied to those dramatists and the production of those works.

Comparison to other Texts

Pinter's Landscape and the Boundaries of Narrative.
The article presents the analysis of playwright Harold Pinter on modern dramas including "The Caretaker," "The Collection," and "The Basement." Most of the modern dramas of Pinter dealt on the fundamental elements of narrative theory. He exposed most of the fundamental elements and conventions of narrative on his literary works.

Literary Reference Centre

EBSCO - Literary Reference Centre (LRC) This link opens in a new window

Forrest Library Catalogue

Oliver This link opens in a new window

Search the catalogue for Harold Pinter's plays, literary criticism ebooks & eaudiobooks:

"The Caretaker"

Study Guide / LitCharts

The Caretaker
Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Harold Pinter's The Caretaker. Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Use the book icon at the top of the web page to hide advertising and display an easier to read page.

Literary Devices

Dramatic Literature
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but, rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total impact of the experience.

ClickView Video

Not long after the start of the 20th Century, playwrights, influenced by the horrors of war, began to experiment with theatre in a way which depicted many of the long held historical, social and cultural beliefs and practices as meaningless and chaotic. Incorporating interviews with influential director Bijan Sheibani and other key figures, this film traces the evolution of modern theatre from its Existentialist roots through Absurdism to Realism via the works of Ionesco, Beckett, Pinter and even the writers of Coronation Street. (2011)

In the intimate confines of the Writers Theatre bookstores space that puts the audience right in the room with Aston, Davies and Mick, you'll feel every "Pinter-esque" pause and every moment of menace in this masterpiece of modern drama.

NOVEMBER 8 - MARCH 25, 2012; Writer's Theatre; USA.

Context

British theatre and stage design
British theatre and stage design
In 19th-century Britain the audiences shaped both the theatres and the dramas played within them. The upper class favoured opera, while the working class, whose population in London alone tripled between 1810 and 1850, wanted broadly acted theatre with scenic wonders and machinery. And as the audience grew in number, the Georgian theatre building, which was small and intimate, began to disappear.
Aestheticism (art movement)
Aestheticism, late 19th-century European arts movement which centred on the doctrine that art exists for the sake of its beauty alone, and that it need serve no political, didactic, or other purpose.

11LIT - Drama "The Importance of Being Earnest" & "The Caretaker": The Caretaker

"The Caretaker" by Harold Pinter (Kareem Bandealy (Mick) and William J. Norris (Davies). Photo by Michael Brosilow, 2012).