Harold Pinter's play with form: A cross-media analysis of his texts

Harold Pinter has taken fourteen of his twenty-eight dramatic texts through some process of formal adaptation across media: narrative fiction to radio and television; radio to stage and television; television to stage; or stage to film and television. This thesis examines Pinter's perpetual manipulation of form and content and the media through which they are expressed. Moving through a detailed analysis of thirteen of his works and their adaptations, this study examines Pinter's methodology in this process in a more focused and comprehensive manner than has been attempted in Pinter scholarship to this date.; Pinter's work is of particular interest in a study of cross-media adaptation, for the self-consciousness of his preoccupation with his own modes of expression combined with his thematic concerns about the control and expression of meaning tie the form and content of his work and the medium through which they are expressed in a very explicit way. Since the medium is so bound to Pinter's meaning, when the medium changes the play's thematics are often significantly altered.; This study is organized into chapter headings according to the originally intended medium: narrative fiction, radio, television, and the stage. Each chapter first considers the original texts, focusing particularly on how meaning has been shaped and influenced by the intended mode of expression. I then turn to examine Pinter's manipulation of form and content through adaptation, in the process of which the meaning of the texts will be reconsidered in light of the new medium.; In some of the thirteen cases, the meaning of the work is so intimately tied to its original form that the change of medium seems to preclude satisfactory thematic translation. We see this in the stage adaptations of the radio plays The Dwarfs and Slight Ache and also in the television version of Old Times. In most cases, however, Pinter embraces the new medium---recognizing its potentials and limitations---and manipulates the text from within to rework the perspectives of the original. In these cases, the playwright's adaptations of his original works stand as aesthetically realized and independent works of art.