they'd interpret your very being, especially if you had books under your arms, as evidence of being a communist. If you went by, or happened to be passing, a Fascist street meeting and looked in any way antagonistic. Also, I went to a Jewish club, by an old railway arch, and there were quite a lot of people often waiting with broken milk bottles in a particular alley we used to walk through. If you looked remotely like a Jew you might be in trouble. I got into quite a few fights down there. I did encounter it in quite an extreme form after the war, in the East End, when the Fascists were coming back to life in England. "Every one encounters violence in some way or other. Amongst Cockneys, Chinese, Blacks, and Irish, radical fascists clashed with left-wing Jewish militants. Here swelled a large Jewish population of refugees displaced earlier by events like the Russian pogroms of 1905, WWI, and later by Hitler's attempted extermination. Harold Pinter grew up in the East End of London, amidst a political battlefield. Only very superficial observers could overlook this social, this political side of this playwright."īy examining the historical context of Pinter's life and the world in which The Dumb Waiter exists we gain a deeper understanding of the play as a whole. In his Noble Prize Lecture he clearly displays this side of his life commenting on his search for the truth as a citizen in context of world affairs, specifically American political intrusion.Īs Martin Esslin comments on Pinter's work in his book The Peopled Wound, "behind the highly private world of his plays, there also lurk what after all, are the basic political problems: the use and abuse of power the fight for living space cruelty terror. This of course became more apparent in his later years when he emerged more publicly as a vehement activist, speaking out about such issues like: the War in Vietnam, Apartheid in South Africa, American militarism, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Although Pinter's work may at first appear apolitical and completely devoid of such influences, let alone a sensible dose of average circumstantial reality, when examined more closely we see that Pinter's work as a playwright and as a citizen isn't so detached from political content as we might first assume. Harold Pinter's work is highly influenced by the the contextual premises and circumstances of his life.
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