The problem of communication or more radically put, the lack of communication is a recurrent fascination with Pinter and the contours of this thematic facilitates his anti-realistic or what is simplistically called his absurdist stance.
The element runs across his canon. Meg and Petey (Birthday Party) facing each other on the dining table with the newspaper as an obstruction to their communication is a classic image of it. Stanley's speech degenerating into sounds is yet another striking example.
Non-communication as in The Caretaker often leads to menacing ambivalence and a toppling of power equations in Pinter's work. In plays like Landscape, Silence and Night Pinter explores a dialogic structure where a complex cross-talk and constant mirroring of all the speeches of the different characters constantly collapse it into a monologue where there is no self-communication either.
The political implications of non-communication is apparent in the late-plays. In Montain Language, silence as a product of non-communication is seen as a strange power whereas the loss of memory in A Kind of Alaska is taken advantage of in conspiratorial ways. In One for the Road or Ashes to Ashes, there is a counter-pattern in so far as it is used to sustain the dominant discourse in a way of seeming.
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