| During the past twenty years, Harold Pinter's innovative contributions in language, style, and form have secured his prominence in contemporary dramatic literature. Pinter as a writer of dramatic literature and a practical man of the theatre has saturated the stage with a creative artistry that departs significantly from the social satires, moral outrages, and philosophical expositions of his contemporaries. Most scholarly studies focus on explication of the texts, analysis of character, definition of symbols, or application of literary, sociological, or psychological theory to the plays. Rather than elucidate, this kind of criticism often detracts from, even clouds, the excellence of Pinter's art. With Pinter, interpretation based on content and meaning alone does not suffice because the plays transcend the traditional dramatic designations and expectations and rely on the reader's or spectator's emotional response to the dramatic event. Unlike most dramatists, Pinter involves the reader in the creative process by setting the imagination in motion and allowing the play to unfold, line by line, image by image, to form a unified dramatic unity.; This study makes a claim for Pinter's imaginative and creative abilities based largely on his own opinions about playwriting, dramatic art, and contemporary theatre. The claim is supported by first exploring the history and nature of imagination and creative process, how art is born from them and evaluated by critics and philosophers, and what art, creativity, and imagination mean to certain creative individuals. Second, the study details how the critics perceive Pinter and how he perceives them; his background and influence; his creative process; the emergence and development of his playwrighting abilities; language and imagery as the major dramatic elements of his plays; and the diversity of his creative talents as demonstrated in his experiments in radio and television drama and the cinema. Third, the study offers Pinter's views on theatre and provides a description of Pinter's plays. Finally, the study shows how Pinter's characters grow out of and actually mirror the imaginative processes of their creator as they participate in the dramatic event of the play. The focus on the imagination and creative expression provides a general backdrop against which Pinter and his ideas on dramatic art reflect a highly intuitive mind that depends on and responds to the dynamic, evolutionary nature of art. |
