Deadly Pinter: Ghostly Precedents and New Possibilities for Staging

Abstract

Recent productions of Harold Pinter’s full-length plays in the West End demonstrate how a fidelity to the text or previous productions can limit the scope for reinvention in future performances of Pinter’s work. As a contribution to the discussion of how to stage Pinter, which has become even more urgent since his death, this essay considers Peter Brook’s theory of the Deadly Theatre from The Empty Space. The argument is not about the quality of these recent productions but rather about what is gained from more imaginative, if less reverential, approaches to Pinter’s texts and what may be lost when we entomb the texts within their historical contexts. To avoid Pinter’s plays becoming museum theatre, new approaches to the context in which his plays were written and to the detail of the text will allow for a greater range of interpretation and indeed a greater performance afterlife for Pinter’s plays.