Learning from Great Writers: Harold Pinter x the Dramatic Pause
Improve your writing with this 5-minute workshop
Welcome to my writing workshop, where I borrow techniques from great writers to help improve your writing (and mine too).
Today, we’re looking at the use of pauses. Our example is the British playwright, Harold Pinter (1930–2008).
Today’s Menu
1. Who was Harold Pinter?
2. The main idea
3. Examples
4. Apply it!
1. Who was Harold Pinter?
Harold Pinter was one of the most influential British playwrights of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005 and the French Légion d’Honneur in 2007. He left the world stage with the same fire and grit with which he began. His Nobel lecture, titled “Art, Truth, and Politics” was a seething critique of the erosion of truth in 21st century western democracies. His prolific body of work comprises more than 30 plays for stage and screen.
Among the many marks Pinter left on modern dramatic literature, perhaps he is most known for his use of pauses. From short, sharp beats to grueling silences, pauses produce some fascinating dramatic effects in Pinter’s works. Let’s take a closer look at how Pinter’s sounds of silence worked, and perhaps we can glean a thing or two for ourselves.
2. The main idea
My Mac dictionary tells me that a pause is “a temporary stop in action or speech.”
We ran inside during a brief pause in the rain.
The admiral chattered away without pause.
A pause is an interruption of speech or action. And guess what? Theatre is THE medium of speech AND action. All this is blindingly obvious, but I remind you simply because it’s all too easily forgotten when we’re talking about writing.
Pinter uses pauses in different ways. Sometimes, pauses create tension between characters; other times, they convey emotional states.
He uses pauses to build suspense, establish a rhythm, and break that rhythm.
Pauses also instill a sense of unease in an audience. You can keep the audience waiting in anticipation for the characters’ next move with a carefully placed pause. You can invite the audience to reflect on a particular line or word uttered before the pause.
When I re-read Pinter’s plays, I get the sense that pauses are also rifts in his inner dialogue.
Pinter once described his writing process as recording (on paper) the conversations that voices had in his head. His playwriting process would often start with a single word or a sentence that he’d hear a character say in his mind, and from there, he’d tune into a stream of sound.
At the same time, I get the feeling that Pinter’s overemphasis on pauses is a way of reminding us that silence is paradoxically the essence of speech; that without silence, without the contrast of stillness, sound wouldn’t vibrate and words wouldn’t resonate.
Pinter reflected on the dramatic use of pauses and silence at numerous points in his career. Early on in 1962, for example, he noted how speech itself can be understood as a foil for deafening silence:
There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it. That is its continual reference. The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don’t hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its place. When true silence falls we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant strategem to cover nakedness.
(Harold Pinter Plays One, Faber and Faber, 1996)
Those are some of the many different functions of pauses in Pinter’s plays. Let’s move on and look at some examples.
3. Some examples
At the beginning of Act 2 in The Caretaker, Pinter’s sixth play written in 1960, Mick comes back to his London flat and discovers that Davies, a cantankerous old tramp, slept in his bed the night before. Mick’s brother, Aston, brought Davies back to the flat after rescuing him from a fight in the cafe he was working at. Mick wants rid of Davies and roughs him up at the start of Act 2. In the scene I have chosen here, Davies scrambles to put his trousers on in an attempt to flee. Read the passage and I’ll see you in a minute or two.
As you can see, there are four pauses on this page. Let’s name them P1, P2, P3 and P4 for brevity. Are these pauses all the same, or are they distinct? Let’s take a look.
P1 follows a specific action: Mick flicks Davies’ trousers in Davies’ face “several times.” This act is clearly aggressive. Pinter could have had Davies react after the first flick. Perhaps with a line showing irritation. Or, after the second flick, he could have had Davies respond with an insult. But Pinter insists on a third flick. The result is humiliation. The only reaction to an aggressive act repeated three times is a quiet retreat. P1 tells us Davies is now a slave to Mick’s violent will. Mick might want Davies gone. Davies might want to go himself. But Mick’s action and the well-placed pause suggests that this is now a game of cat and mouse. Captivity!
P2 follows Davies’ revelation that he was “brought here.” He is not a squatter or a vagrant who managed to break into the flat. He is there on some authority. This changes the terms of the game somewhat, because Mick must now contend with the possibility that a third party is involved. Any plans for torture with impunity are now compromised. P2 marks this change of tack. Pinter gives Mick a moment to recalibrate and signals to the audience that a subtle shift is under way.
P3 is the reverse of P2. This time, Davies is attempting a new strategy. He is speaking in “crumbs,” displaying his weakness to Mick, in an effort to play to any scrap of sympathy Mick might have locked away somewhere. So P2 is a moment for Davies to test whether this new approach is working. Mick’s response, “Fibber,” is an indirect way of telling Davies to indulge him with the strategy a little while longer. So the game of cat and mouse is back on.
P4 comes after Davies tells Mick the truth about why he is staying in his flat. Mick likely knows that Davies is telling the truth, but the pause gives him license to play the game some more. He repeats the “fibber” claim. Hunting season is open once more.
These four successive pauses demonstrate Pinter’s mastery of nuance through repetition. Each pause has a slightly different function, but each one replaces what could have otherwise been more dialogue, more language. But by cutting back expectations and cutting the characters off at opportune moments, Pinter is able to create a meta-layer in his play. A subtext of silence. The language on display is only the tip of the iceberg. There is a vast world to explore in the silent world beneath. So pauses are a strategy, and they are deployed with precision. Never gratuitous or arbitrary, always to elicit an effect.
4. Apply it!
If you’re a serious writer, regardless of your medium, you could do much worse than spend a couple of hours reading one of Pinter’s plays, and doing the sort of analytical work I have just sketched out above. Read the text closely and take notes on the different uses of pauses that you discover. Write examples of those pauses so that you can refer back to them at a later date.
From the short excerpt we’ve looked at here, it should be clear that pauses can be an effective way of creating tension and suspense, of opening spaces for reflection, of changing the mood or dynamic among characters, of breaking rhythm and pace, but also of creating a rhythmic subtext too.
When using pauses in your writing, it is important to remember that they should be used strategically. Too many pauses can make the story drag, and detract from the impact of the scene. So, pick yourself up a copy of a Pinter play and do some forensic pause work! Let me know what you find! I’d love to hear more.
- Here is the full list of Pinter’s plays on Wikipedia.
- If you want to listen to some of Pinter’s work in audio format, I recommend the BBC Radio 4 production of Pinter’s screenplay “Victory” narrated by the brilliant Simon Russell Beale.
- I also recommend the BBC Radio 4 production of “The Dreaming Child” by Pinter. It’s based on a short story by the Danish writer, Karen Blixen.
