Harold Pinter's "Pinteresque" Cold War Contexts: From Loamshire to East Berlin

品特的冷戰情境：從中產階級英國到東柏林

10.7060/KNUJ-HA.201012.0055

白思明(Simon White)

品特 ； 威脅 ； 冷戰 ； Pinter ； Menace ； Cold War

高雄師大學報：人文與藝術類

29期（2010 / 12 / 01）

55 - 69

英文

本文討論品特的早期劇作，劇中情境落在偶爾呈現歇斯底里氛圍的冷戰時期。本文沒有單刀直入採取政治批判觀點批評政府濫權，而是探討「品特式」戲劇中著名的「威脅」、狹小壓迫的空間、沒有明說的暴力氣氛，視其為冷戰期間社會與個人的存在隱喻－品特的劇本往往避談冷戰。因此品特的早期劇作雖然「非關」政治，然而讀者假如想要更完整了解這些難懂的戲劇，就不能忽略其中的直接類比。

This paper discusses Harold Pinter’s early dramatic works in the context of the occasionally hysterical atmosphere of the Cold War. Rather than simply taking the perspective of a political criticism of governmental abuse of power, a theme to which Pinter was to return sensationally in the 1980s and 1990s, this paper approaches the famed ”menace” of the ”Pinteresque” drama, the oppressively constrained and small spaces, and the air of unstated violence as a social and personal metaphor of existence during the period of the Cold War, which always constitutes the elephant, or perhaps the weasel, in the room. Whilst not ”about” politics, therefore, indirect analogies in the early works cannot be ignored if a fuller understanding is to be reached of unapologetically frustrating plays whose characters are so infamously inscrutable and where meaning is at once inexhaustible and beyond reach.

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