| Harold Pinter, a prominent contemporary British playwright, writes dramas filled with ambiguous (indeed, contradictory) details about character biographies and seemingly inexplicable character motives. Theatre artists who decide to produce his scripts need to find tentative answers, and a way to synthesize those answers, before parameters can be developed for characterization and character action. Many of the tools used in previous attempts to discover understanding in Pinter's scripts have proven less than totally successful because they have not adequately dealt with the fabric of the characters' social life which the playwright has constantly directed interpreters to examine.; The purpose of this study was to analyze the social location of individual characters within the dramatic world of Pinter's The Birthday Party. It was explained that to determine social location is to pinpoint the individual on the social "map" and, in so doing, to discover the specific social forces (rules) which the individual has consciously, or unconsciously, accepted as a guide for living. The specific objectives of this study were: (1) through application of the social theory of Peter L. Berger, to discover which social rules are active in the dramatic environment of The Birthday Party and which characters are responsible for their presence; (2) to analyze the impact of these rules on the choices characters make pertaining to self, their relations with others, and the way these choices affect their emotional evaluation of the world; and (3) to assess the usefulness of information gained through this type of analysis to directors and actors as they approach the practical task of preparing Pinter's playscripts for an audience.; This analysis yielded two main conclusions: (1) rule-system analysis has greatly increased the amount of information which can be derived about characters from the script of The Birthday Party. This approach has provided a way to see through the ambiguity and contradictions in the script, and has allowed for a definition of character, action, and motives. No matter what a character said, or did, this analytic approach allowed one to state why he was doing it. It did this in an intelligent, logical way, and did so by examining and ordering the social facts which exist in the playscript; and (2) the results of this study indicated that rule-system analysis, based on the Berger theoretical model, allows for the stating of hypothetical Formal Cause in Pinter's script. Since one may never know for sure what Pinter intended as meaning for an audience, it was further concluded that the use of this approach, as a way of stating the implied meaning, seems both useful and significant. |
