Introduction
I find it noteworthy that a friend of Harold Pinter is said to have admonished theatre critics not to approach Pinter’s plays too “portentously”, on pain of fundamentally misunderstanding them. Likewise, Pinter himself was always wary of proffering to interviewers any deep philosophical meaning attaching to his works. Yet the suggestion of a lack of profundity in Pinter’s plays will be a matter of concern to most theatre critics. The problem is that if the putative meaning of a play should turn out to be frivolous, then it becomes difficult to see why the critics themselves should not be dispensed with. Exeunt critics stage left.
I dare say, however, that there is an alternative exit to be found from this particular critical cul-de-sac. Perhaps it lies in resisting a conflation of the philosophical with the profound. Pinter’s plays, like those of Beckett, may sometimes seem to suggest that the proper place of humour in our lives could be more foundational than we thought. Such an hypothesis ought to prompt us to revisit our conception of comedy per se and its relation to tragedy. This is a recognisably existentialist line of thought, which may terminate only in the kind of absurdism according to which the potential reach of the comic into human life becomes pervasive, total, all-enveloping.
Back in February 2020, I wanted to see if the philosophical question of absurdism could help me formulate a response to a performance of Pinter’s The Caretaker at the Loft Theatre, Leamington Spa. This is what I discovered.
Shumanities 