A review of recent literature on Pinter reveals a renewed interest in analysing his work under the overlapping rubrics of politics, power relations, memory, and language as well as a new trend of approaching it using other, different perspectives such as gender, identity, class, culture, race, violence, and media. Lucy Jeffery (2020) attempts an analysis of Pinter’s political poetry which critics/scholars often sidestep for its imprecision and unskillfulness when compared to his more intricate and well-structured drama. Resuming the intellectual thread of debates made by Basil Chiasson (2017) about the political nature of Pinter’s work, Jeffery inspects the political resonances of some of these neglected poems with respect to the political incentives that allegedly ignited the Cold War, Gulf War, and Iraq War in addition to the subsequent claims made by antiwar activists against the integrity of the declared objectives of these wars. The poems include Partners (1985), American Football (1991), Don’t Look (1995), and God Bless America (2003).

Chiasson (2020) taps on the element of memory as it manifests itself in Pinter’s speeches on politics rather than his artistic oeuvre. Instead of examining the significance of memory as he uses it in his dramatic works performed on either the stage or the screen, Chiasson concentrates on discussing the role memory plays in Pinter’s discourse as a political critic of postwar Europe. Chiasson examines Pinter’s statements about the existence of certain kinds of political memory and the forms through which this memory is recollected.

Graham Saunders (2023) offers a reappraisal and new visions of Pinter’s work in a way that deviates from previous, well-established reviews of specific key historical and contemporary productions of some of his screenplays since his death in 2008. The reappraisal includes discussing Pinter’s position as “a political writer and political activist—from disassociation and neutrality on the subject until relatively late in his career when his drama sought to explicitly address questions of political dissent and torture by totalitarian regimes” (p. 1). Saunders also comments on Pinter’s artistic reputation as a British writer of absurdist drama and the way the element of memory underlies his dramaturgy. Further, Saunders explores Pinter’s attitudes towards and representations of the motifs of “gender” and “race” in his drama.

Besides the relationship between memory and Pinter’s politics, other scholars and critics have concentrated their efforts on examining the relationship between gender and power. James A. Jarrett (2020) focuses his critiques on analysing Pinter’s works that belong to the later period of his career, which he claims has received far less attention than the early or middle period. In this regard, Jarrett investigates Sleuth (2007), Pinter’s final screenplay, which discusses the patriarchal attitudes of Tindle and Wyke to practise and maintain sexual, social, and masculine powers as well as psychological advantages over Maggie and even over one another using some intricate verbal and nonverbal tactics. In addition, Jarret taps on the issues of identity, performance, and epistemology. Similarly, Ann C. Hall (2023) examines Pinter’s screenplay and the Robert Losey film, The Servant (1963), considering the gender question. Apart from reading the work in terms of the concepts of colonialism and homophobia, Hall calls in this article for a closer analysis of the character of Susan, Tony’s fiancé, in order to highlight the work’s criticism of not only colonial power but also patriarchal power. In the same vein, Alix Burbridge (2022) highlights how characters in Pinter’s Betrayal manipulate language to instil dominant gendered roles and control the gender hierarchy in their relationships with others. Burbridge also exposes the weaknesses of both the male and female characters who think themselves invulnerable to the dynamics of power. The relationship between language and power is quite interestingly discussed by Guido Almansi and Simon Henderson (2021). They examine Pinter’s work in the light of the post-modernist theories and applications of language, particularly his unique employment of language games and dialogic silences as smokescreens behind which characters hide their fear of sociocultural contact.

Arka Chattopadhyay (2021) and Farah Ali (2023) also revive the question of power relations by examining Pinter’s A Kind of Alaska (1982) to expose the influence of the social structure of healthcare on feminine identity. Patient Deborah risks her own freedom by yielding to the healthcare worker, Doctor Hornby. Chattopadhyay views the relationship between Hornby and Deborah as channelled by a set of medical metaphors invested as a political critique of the doctor’s authoritarian practices. Chattopadhyay thus draws our attention to the relevance of the question of power negotiated in Pinter’s theatre to the human experience during pandemic times. Ali too highlights Pinter’s critique of the authoritative power practised by the male doctor over the female patient. Using the dynamics of this medical encounter, Ali tracks Deborah’s journey towards recuperation and uncovers the reasons of her social dissociation.

Farah Ali (2022) adds to her discussion of power relations in The Caretaker (1960) other issues of class and identity. To that end, she applies Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial theory of ambivalence to the critical reading of Pinter’s play. She examines the dynamics of the relationship that exists between Davies, the tramp, and the two brothers, Aston and Mick, with reference to the issues of class conflict and Britain’s colonial past, showing how Davies attempts to control their attitudes and identities during his stay in and departure from the house. Their defensive encounter with hegemonic Davies results in a permanent transformation of their identities on the subconscious level.

Basil Chiasson and Catriona Fallow (2021) handle Pinter’s theatre, ideology, and socio-cultural influence with fresh and different conceptions. With a declining zeal for reading Pinter as a postmodernist, absurdist writer, the advent of the third millennium has witnessed an accelerating attitude towards exploring the critical reception gained after the staging of Pinter’s plays in different sociopolitical, geographical, and cultural contexts. This explains Chiasson and Fallow’s inclusion in their works of interviews with directors and filmmakers involved in the global production of Pinter’s drama today. Chiasson and Fallow participate in and develop these international critical explorations by reexamining some of the various stages, networks, and collaborations that shaped Pinter’s career and were fashioned by its details. The stages explored include “the evolution of Pinter’s career and the myriad of stages that his work has appeared on” (p. 12). The networks are understood in terms of the “exchange of ideas, practices and influence, as well as systems of interconnected people, places or works” that continue to define his legacy as a dramatist and political activist. Collaborations fall within these networks and are “evident in the way his work engages with previous literary and theatrical movements and how, in turn, his works have been taken up and evolved by subsequent playwrights, practitioners and scholars”. These collaborations have bred Pinter’s reputation as a socio-cultural public figure with an influence on contemporary British playwrights’ dramaturgies.

Pim Verhulst (2021) studies Pinter’s evolving use of media, from radio and audio technologies to acoustic and visual media, in staging his plays throughout his early, mid-, and late careers. The plays studied include, respectively, The Hothouse; A Night Out and Night School; and Landscape and Family Voices. The aim of this study is to better understand Pinter’s theatrical practice and highlight the usually overlooked importance of the media tradition in it.

Inspired by the arising curiosity of recent Pinteresque scholars to excavate virgin spaces that lie within Pinter’s creative experimentation with theatrical convention, set design, language and theme, this article attempts to examine the political metaphorization of Pinter’s earlier plays branded as comedies of menace. The aim is to validate both the playwright’s own description of them as political metaphors and other scholars’ statements about the limitedness of the tradition of classifying his entire dramatic legacy into two or three content-based periods as will be demonstrated later. The investigation of how far such claims made by Pinter or his theatre reviewers are legitimate has not been textually and technically conducted. My textual and technical rereading of The Room and The Dumb Waiter is an attempt to unearth the political meanings and practices his comedies of menace are replete with through exposing the operationality of such practices of mental and physical subjections and demonstrating their effects on characters’ freedom of expression, behaviour, and beliefs.

The article consists of three major sections. First, it begins with a review of Pinter’s theatrical legacy, which falls mainly under the two categories of political comedy and comedy of menace. Then, the article presents a rationalization of how his earliest plays, in particular, surpass the limits of this traditional, theme-based categorization. Later, the article presents its theoretical framework and methodologies, including Brecht’s theory of Defamiliarization and Pinter’s unique, theatrical use of it in the context of his concept of hollow language. Finally, the article scrutinizes The Room and The Dumb Waiter in the light of Pinter’s defamiliarizing technique of image creation and destruction which renders the two plays their political mood.

1.1 Pinter’s Political Theatre

British dramatist and noble-prize winner Harold Pinter vigorously endorsed freedom of expression and ideological diversity. A member of P.E.N. and Amnesty International, he conscientiously opposed national and international practices of coercive persuasion, censorship, and violence for political aims. Through his published political speeches, articles, and drama, he uttered his condemnation of individual and state-sanctioned repressive policies. This motivation underlies, for example, his indictment of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s domestic and foreign policies which were “brutal and cynical. None of them has to do with democratic aspirations. All of them have to do with intensification and consolidation of state power” (Pinter 2013b, p. 190). Democracy, for Pinter, is a pretext for justifying super powerful nations’ interference in other inferior nations’ internal affairs. The central argument here is not the concept of democracy itself, but the means by which democracy is manipulated. Pinter proposes that language is used by manipulative authorities or governments as a pragmatic tool of evasiveness and hedging to achieve domestic and foreign interests or terminate oppositions threatening its structures everywhere.

In the context of using it for the pragmatic purposes of evasiveness and hedging, democracy for Pinter, thus, is a political toptext that masquerades the subtext of manipulation and suppression. People are manipulated and suppressed by power, violence, threats, and phoney claims. In Pinter’s political theatre, specifically the latest pieces as will be elaborated later, he investigates the linguistic mechanism of these methods and their impact on the ideologies and bodies of subjects, as he declares to Mel Gussow in the New York Times: “I feel the question of how power is used and how violence is used, how you terrorize somebody, how you subjugate somebody, has always been alive in my work” (1994, p. 61). The questions of power, terrorization and subjugation are all political. His theatre addresses these practices, usually metaphorically and sometimes explicitly, and shows the struggle of individuals to escape them. This struggle typically defines his political plays. Responding to a claim made by Ramon Simo that “Brutality and violence are always present in [his] political plays”, Pinter does not deny it and even adds: “They are violent. Violence has always been in my plays, from the very beginning. The Room ends with a sudden, totally gratuitous act of violence on the part of a man who kicks a negro to death” (2013b. p. 216). This statement is valuable in two ways. It substantiates the claim that Pinter’s first play, The Room, is not devoid of political thought and that the themes of brutality and violence inspire the entirety of his drama and give it its political taste. So, we find in Pinter’s earliest plays, The Room and The Dumb Waiter, oppressive or hegemonic characters (Bert, Riley, Ben, Wilson) attempting to maintain existent reality and present it to other subservient, powerless characters (Rose, Ben) as being absolute and undebatable. The purpose is keeping the status quo as it already is and suppressing in subjects the instinctive drive to question its authenticity. The guiding principle Pinter metaphorically conveys is either to serve the dominant power or to receive a physical penalty. The kind of peace, justice, and welfare a subordinate person might thus find by allowing democracy to rule his/her life is acquired only with an absolute, submissive will to serve and dedicate one’s life to meet the needs and adopt the strategies or roadmaps laid out by the so-called defenders of democracy alone.

By examining and contrasting Pinter’s statements about his own ideas of politics and political theatre, a contradiction is noticed. He claims that he doesn’t allow his “strong political views” to nurse his work (Merritt 1990, p. 175), nor does he hold any “placards” or “banners” (Pinter 1961, p. 175) while experimenting with drama. In the same manner, in “Writing for the Theatre”, he denies being “a theorist”, “an authoritative or reliable commentator on the dramatic scene” (2013b, p. 28). Likewise, he tells Gussow that not “every work I have written is political”, particularly “Landscape or Old Times” (1988, p. 17). Yet, we sense a contradiction when he himself describes his earlier plays as “political metaphors” that condemn the abuse of authority which implements physical and mental tortures to suppress subjects (Pinter and Nicholas 1985, p. 7). He also tells Gussow that “in the early days,…, [he] was a political playwright of a kind” and that the early plays concerned “themselves with social and political structures” (1994, p. 67). Mark Taylor-Batty addresses the possible reasons of this kind of contradiction by suggesting that “Pinter was not one to want to declare his political position and specify his class enemy as might an Osborne or a Wesker” (2014, p. 161). I agree with Taylor-Batty and add that Pinter’s plays are intuitively anchored in political thoughts and practices because he was mainly interested in politics and its role in subjugating nations and individuals, a criterion which defines thoroughly the style and content of his dramatic project.

Pinter specifies the nature of his theatre by stating that it is “essentially exploratory” and “a critical act” (1994, p. 101). The audience go to the theatrical performances of his plays with certain convictions and leave with others, for it liberates their minds from the restraints of reality established by social, political, or religious structures. Theatre is not a medium he employs for mocking the pointlessness of human behaviour and discourse, a typical feature of absurdist theatre, “nothing could be more misleading” (Hall 2009, p. 160). He was interested in examining, evaluating, and condemning the post-WWII governmental pursuit of deterring oppositions and forming monotonous thought and ideological hierarchy. His political dramatic enterprises were not subjective or biased, neither did they embrace a reflective or absurdist style, mirroring or criticizing only social phenomena and human conduct. He preferred the interventionist style with its capacity of uncovering and altering reality for the purpose of subjecting the human mind to a dual process of reconsideration of the status quo and erection of change in what appears static or dogmatic. In his theatre, we usually encounter a physically and mentally oppressed character who is coercively driven by other oppressive characters to reconsider his/her evaluations of existing conditions. So, what makes Pinter’s theatre political is not only its discussion of political themes but also its adoption of the interventionist style.

Political theatre is “interventionist” (Patterson 2003, p. 18), by way of making the audience intervene in the theatrical experience. In this type of theatre, the audience’s interpretation of represented reality is altered and their perception of it is challenged. This perspective of the interventionism of political theatre and its ability to influence the audience is likewise championed by Augusto Boal (2008). He hints that political theatre wields the power of “transforming the spectator into observer, arousing his critical consciousness and capacity for action” (p. 80). By turning the audience from the status of being mere viewers into another of estranged observers, who can participate in the process of evaluating and judging the dramatic content presented onstage, the imagined fourth wall of theatre is destroyed. This basically politically theatrical practice, which will be further addressed theoretically in a later section, underlies even Pinter’s earliest comedies of menace, not only the final pieces as argued by some critics.

1.2 Pinter’s Comedy of Menace

The term “comedy of menace” was first deployed as a dramatic genre when David Campton used it as a subtitle in his 1958 play The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace. Yet, to Irving Wardle goes the credit of holding Pinter’s earliest drama under the umbrella of the dramatic genre of comedy of menace. In his critical appraisal of Pinter’s play The Birthday Party, Wardle describes, albeit very briefly, protagonist Stanley’s “protected atmosphere” as infringed by “menacing intrusions” caused by Goldberg and Mccann, two “furies emerging from Stanley’s night thoughts as physical characters” (1958, p. 40). Here, imagination is turned into reality, and peacefulness into menace. Stanley’s unconscious dreams become consciously recognizable through Goldberg and Mccann. They shatter Stanley’s sense of security and interrupt his chosen mood of social self-exile.

Francesca Coppa (2009) uses Freud’s joke-theory as a background for approaching the comic element in Pinter’s earliest comedies of menace. To Coppa, jokes resemble “theatrical events” in as much as they are intended for “pleasing or impressing an audience” (p. 43). She compares the public effect of performing comic plays to that produced by the humorous activity of telling jokes; both involve a recognizable three-way relationship between “the aggressor, the victim and the audience”. The aggressor is the joke teller, the victim is the object of the action of joke-telling, and the audience is the third impartial party who undergoes a “litmus test”. The audience’s subsequential laughter indicates their alignment with the joke teller; their silence denotes their empathy with the victim. Based on this tripartite relationship, Coppa finds a structural synonymity between Freud’s joke-theory and Pinter’s earliest drama. Echoing the underlying structure of jokes, Pinter’s earliest plays feature similar structures of “triangulated relationship” and thematic contents of “dominance and subjugation” (Coppa 2009, pp. 43, 44). Ben’s selective and loud reading of stories in the newspaper in The Dumb Waiter is set by Coppa, for example, as a model of joke-structure highlighting comically people’s “stupidity or cruelty” as flaws for which they deserve a punishment (p. 47). Coppa, however, undermines the importance of this content, describing it as “meaningless”, and lays instead extra emphasis on the “alliances and antagonisms” invoked among the members of this triangle structure.

Coppa (2009) and Richard A. Cave (2009) ally in their refusal of the inclination of interpreting Pinter’s comedies of menace as belonging to the genre of black comedy, viewing the essence and dramatic mechanism of either genre as antithetical to the other (p. 51 & p. 136). Menace involves ignorance, vagueness, and fear of the unknown or the unfamiliar. In comedies of menace, there is always an unidentified, equivocal force causing an intricate state of disturbance, threats, or violence endured by other members of the social context of the play. The force in this case is an abstract, common condition of uncertainty aroused by a collapsed social, economic, or religious system. Black comedy, in contrast, tackles serious themes comically, but the struggling forces or the persons intensifying the dramatic tension are recognizable. The joke structure models found in The Room and The Dumb Waiter are not “deliberately funny” or “blackly humorous” (Coppa 2009, pp. 44–45). Both plays do not prompt our laughter by means of having some characters face serious events or conditions posed by other opponent characters, such as pain, loss, or death. We cannot get hold of any foe characters who oppose or set up conspiracies against the key characters who are represented as already submissive, including Rose and Gus. The unjustified and mysterious death cases, of both Riley and Gus, which conclude both plays do not call, however, for laughter. They instead invite our contemplation, doubt, and inquiry. The comic element which really makes the audience break into laughter lies in the ignorance they observe in characters who fail to identify themselves, surroundings, pasts, and roles. In addition, we don’t spot in both dramas “baleful, naive, or inept characters” living in “a fantastic or nightmarish modern world” (Abrams and Geoffrey 2015, p. 2). This procedure would ruin the political nature of Pinter’s theatre that involves “plays which deal with the real world, not with a manufactured or fantasy world” (Pinter 2013b, p. 216). Rose’s visitors are not by nature physically threatening or terrifying, neither do they directly or indirectly threaten her life or Bert’s by any means. They only crumble the way she understands herself, the world, history, and people, offering her a different reality than the one she believes in and uncovering for her the domination of two powers over her life, her husband Bert and her offstage father. As for The Dumb Waiter, although Ben is authoritative and aggressive towards Gus, the first poses no threats to his partner and is even helpless. Both indeed are victimized by an absent, yet dominant, manager who is already in control of their movements, memories, and verbalized thoughts.

Either perspective of considering the earliest plays as black comedies or comedies of menace is imprecise and debatable. It is a justified stand to judge the earliest plays as not belonging in the genre of black comedy for the reasons provided above, but the inclination of adopting a single, unarguable reading of the plays as comedies of menace is disputable, particularly as the characters are not menaced by a fear from an obscure power. They are rather threatened by the pervasive and inescapable ability of this power to change reality and channel their thoughts. Rose of The Room is exposed to threats both from inside and outside her cosyroom by the ability of Mr. Kidd, the Sands and Riley to change the reality of her abode, memory, and even her physical being. Likewise, Gus of The Dumb Waiter is intimidated within the basement by his partner Ben who watches the former’s language, controls his movement, and surveys his thoughts, and outside it by a relentless superior. In both plays, the opponent powers are already recognized/known by the victims, so these powers subdue their victims not through the act of anonymizing their identities but via the adopted strategy of deconstructing the way these victims comprehend the reality of their bodies, settings, and possessions. The kind of menace sensed or experienced in political theatre is used conversely as a method of subjection by which the established system or order polarizes and enslaves its subjects. Another focal point concerning the real political nature of Pinter’s comedies of menace is that their investment of such comic devices as “repetition”, “repartee” and “physical farce” is not intended purely for provoking the audience’s sheer laughter or pointlessly humorous comments (Coppa 2009, p. 45), otherwise these devices would ruin his main objective of alienating his audience’s experience of the dramatic performance. Such devices reflect the restless minds of characters and their incongruous actions and prompt the audience’s inquiries about what is real or phoney, what is certain or uncertain. The devices become metaphorical mediums through which Pinter explores and uncovers theatrically the reality of characters’ cyclicality of mental and physical anguishes.

Approached this way, Pinter’s comedies of menace are not entertaining in as much as they are enlightening and transforming. Experiencing first-hand Rose’s and Gus’s feelings of fear of the future and anxiety about their current physio-psychological conditions does not tempt our laughter in as much as they change our contentions about established reality and negate the impossibility of observing our lives differently. It must be made clear here that I do not infer that Pinter’s plays are devoid of entertaining elements on the comic level. The dramatist’s famous ‘Pinter Pause’ was, he admits, inspired from Jack Benny’s comic shows (The Guardian 2008), and the comic language and behaviour he employs are actually humorously comic. However, I believe the importance of the enlightening and transformative effect of theatre in general for Pinter exceeds the importance of its entertaining effect on the audience. It is relevant here to remember Pinter’s own comment on the humorous element in his plays: “I don’t write what I call funny things, but some of them do make me laugh. I find myself laughing while I’m writing and I notice one or two people also laugh, occasionally” (2013b, p. 218). There is a difference between the nature of something being inherently entertaining and the real purpose it is employed for. The purpose for which this kind of humorous language and action are employed is not mere entertainment. The humour in Pinter’s drama, as he states, is both “terse and critical” (p. 218); its function is to make us see reality in another way, to defamiliarize it and uncover the discreet, manipulative powers guiding our lives. The occasional laughter of the audience during the performance is driven by a recognition of the “ugliness in our selves… our own worst characteristics” (p. 218). The performance induces our laughter at some moments, but not before it tempts our enthusiasm and critical faculties to ask questions and develop doubts about situations we cannot fully understand. Consider, for example, Rose’s anxieties and posed questions about her room, the outside atmosphere, the condition of the basement, the identity of Riley, her own father, and even her real name, as well as Gus’s doubts and enquiries about the identity of their absent boss, the café’s owner, the voice communicating with them through the speaking tube, and the secret organization they work for. The jokes Pinter includes in his plays are thus used for political purposes. They help the dramatist expose human relationships that are imbedded in attitudes of dominance and subjugation.

1.3 Surpassing the Boundaries of Traditional, Content-based Classification of Pinter’s Theatre

There has been a persisting critical tendency to classify Pinter’s drama into comedies of menace and political comedies, as regards the techniques, themes, and context. Some critics and scholars added a third category: the memory play. Stephen Gregory, for example, divides Pinter’s work into three categories (menace, memory, and politics), describing the second as “exploring the tricks and manipulations of memory…and of deceits” and the latter as investigating “the nastier aspects of political life” (1996, p. 326). Zarhy-Levo Yael has a slightly different categorization of Pinter’s aesthetic as falling into only two distinct phases: “his early and mid-career phase (1958–82), and his later political phase (1983–91)” (2009, p. 257), referring to the first as comedies of menace and the second as political comedies. Taylor-Batty (2014) maintains the classifying tradition but dwells extensively on a discussion of Pinter’s later political drama. In the 1980s, Pinter’s drama witnessed “a radical shift, a significant change of direction” (p. 151) to address political and ideological issues within more elaborately political contexts. The shift was mainly spurred by a visit he made to Turkey with Arthur Miller to support “dissident writers” (Billington 2009, p. 514). One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), and Party Time (1991) are thematically political and were coined for political reasons. Taylor-Batty claims they all “address the vulnerability of the weak in the face of unremitting state power” and their oppression “through the deliberate fragmentation of family structures” (2014, p. 151). Gussow poses the same claim by suggesting that they briefly discuss the issues of “political persecution and incarceration” (1994, p.54). Mountain Language, for example, dramatizes the persecution of Kurdish women who are forbidden from speaking their native language called Mountain Language while negotiating for the freedom of their imprisoned relatives. This action of suppressing people’s language and limiting their freedom of expressing themselves and their needs is a political practice traceable, Pinter argues, in England too: “I believe it also reflects what’s happening in England today—the suppression of ideas, speech and thought”. To demonstrate this, he calls on the issue of “homosexuals” who are “singled out for censorship and repression” based on “Clause 28” which he describes as “quite a pervasive act, a law, which is very very dangerous indeed” (Gussow 1994, pp. 56, 57).

There are other Pinter scholars who had “difficulties ‘placing’ Pinter and his drama because he crosses the ‘standard’ boundaries delineated by such binary oppositions” (Merritt 1990, p. 130). Of these are Basil Chiasson, Richard A. Cave, Drew Milne, and even Taylor-Batty. Although their works include references to the critical tendency of the double or triple categorization of Pinter’s plays, they indirectly refute it by expressing its limitedness and rationalize the liability of crossing the borderlines of distinction. In his introduction to The Late Harold Pinter (2017), Chiasson reminds the reading community of the axiomatic canon of chronologically dividing Pinter’s career into three differently labelled, content-based stages:

The early dramas, globally referred to as ‘comedies of menace’; a middle period usually characterized as invested in memory and the presence of the past in the present tense; and a later shift during the early 1980s, where Pinter’s output becomes to a great extent overtly political (p. 1).

Chiasson’s brief reminder of this distinction does by no means entail his own contention with it, for he immediately expresses his belief that such categorization falls short in capturing Pinter’s “dynamic” and stylistic output (2017, p. 1). A relevantly similar standpoint can be traced back to his earlier essay “(Re)Thinking Harold Pinter’s Comedy of Menace” (2009) where he also clearly argues for the possibility of evaluating the later political plays of Pinter in terms of the aesthetic of the comedy of menace (p. 31). In this essay, he blurs the dividing lines between the comedy of menace and political comedy to impart a kind of disbelief in its validity. According to him, Pinter’s “comedies of menace” depend on:

The staging of situations of intrusion, intermingling aggression or even violence with verbal and physical comedy, speech that is riddled with non-sequiturs; characters who incessantly pose questions;” “characters who refuse to answer other characters’ questions; or, similarly, characters who suffer auditory lapses; . . . [and] characters having to negotiate the threat of change or, conversely, the threat of stasis. (2009, pp. 34-35)

Pinter’s political comedies, similarly, feature scenes of “harassment and interrogation” (p. 44). Harassment is not of the body alone; it is of the mind too, an intellectual practice, and it is not an individual phenomenon but rather a collective one because of the common ideological and psychological impacts it entices within us. This idea is reaffirmed in Chiasson’s 2017 book where he argues that Pinter’s political theatre is “intellectually and morally prescriptive” (p. 31). It depicts the enforcement of a certain set of ideas and behaviours upon subservient characters by other ideologically oppressive characters and tries, as proclaimed by Austin Quigley, “to persuade a theatre audience that it should in general be against physical torture, murder and rape” (2001, p. 10).