| Many of Harold Pinter's plays deal with the psychology of anxiety. Severe anxiety influences the speech and behavior of Pinter's characters, and the psychology of anxiety shapes the movement of many of his plays. Pinter is a student of anxiety's power to distort and isolate the self. The effects of anxiety upon awareness is a persistent motif in the plays. Investigations into anxiety by such contemporary psychologists as R. D. Laing, Rollo May and others can illuminate the basic conflicts in the plays, many of which center around the struggle for psychological autonomy. Several of the early plays--The Room, The Birthday Party, A Slight Ache, A Night Out, and Tea Party--are intra-psychic dramas which investigate the sources of anxiety in the minds of single characters. These plays, whose secondary characters are aspects of the protagonists, include a regressive movement in which the several protagonists revisit the origins of their terrible anxiety. Examination of The Dwarfs, The Caretaker and The Homecoming reveals another phase in Pinter's portrayal of anxiety. These plays present a more complex, objective, and philosophical vision of the ravages of anxiety in psychological, sexual, and societal life. These plays, containing strong mythic elements, tend to have comic resolutions. Pinter, like Ionesco, regards a play as a projection of internal anxieties and as "an increasingly intense and revealing series of emotional states." Pinter induces complex anxiety states in his audience in an effort to lead them to a perception of the profound anxieties of his characters. Analysis of The Lover and The Collection reveals a number of the devices by which Pinter creates anxiety. Pinter is a poet interested in the effects of anxiety on the human spirit. The anxiety of the Pinter character begins in a psychic wound which often takes the form of a "betrayal." This betrayal can occur at the earliest moment of an individual's life, or it can be understood in social, sexual, existential or epistemological terms. These various terms are united in plays like The Homecoming or Betrayal. |
