Comedy of menace
Comedy of menace is the body of plays written by David Campton, Nigel Dennis, N. F. Simpson, and Harold Pinter. The term was coined by drama critic Irving Wardle, who borrowed it from the subtitle of Campton's play The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace, in reviewing Pinter's and Campton's plays in Encore in 1958.
Background
Citing Wardle's original publications in Encore magazine, Susan Hollis Merritt points out that in "Comedy of Menace" Wardle "first applies this label to Pinter's work … describ Pinter as one of 'several playwrights who have been tentatively lumped together as the "non-naturalists" or "abstractionists" ' ". His article "Comedy of Menace," Merritt continues,centers on The Birthday Party because it is the only play of Pinter's that Wardle had seen at the time, yet he speculates on the basis of "descriptions of other plays, 'The Room' and 'The Dumb Waiter', is a writer dogged by one image—the womb". Mentioning the acknowledged "literary influences" on Pinter's work—"Beckett, Kafka and American gangster films"—Wardle argues that " 'The Birthday Party' exemplifies the type of comic menace which gave rise to this article."
In "Comedy of Menace", as Merritt observes, on the basis of his experience of The Birthday Party and others' accounts of the other two plays, Wardle proposes that "Comedy enables the committed agents and victims of destruction to come on and off duty; to joke about the situation while oiling a revolver; to display absurd or endearing features behind their masks of implacable resolution; to meet … in paper hats for a game of blind man's buff"; he suggests how "menace" in Pinter's plays "stands for something more substantial: destiny," and that destiny, "handled in this way—not as an austere exercise in classicism, but as an incurable disease which one forgets about most of the time and whose lethal reminders may take the form of a joke—is an apt dramatic motif for an age of conditioned behaviour in which orthodox man is a willing collaborator in his own destruction".
"Just two years later", however, Wardle retracted "Comedy of Menace" in his review of The Caretaker, stating: "On the strength of 'The Birthday Party' and the pair of one-acters, I rashly applied the phrase 'comedy of menace' to Pinter's writing. I now take it back".
After Wardle's retraction of comedy of menace as he had applied it to Pinter's writing, Pinter himself also occasionally disavowed it and questioned its relevance to his work. For example, in December 1971, in his interview with Pinter about Old Times, Mel Gussow recalled that "After The Homecoming said that 'couldn't any longer stay in the room with this bunch of people who opened doors and came in and went out. Landscape and Silence are in a very different form. There isn't any menace at all.' " Later, when Gussow asked Pinter to expand on his view that he had "tired" of "menace", Pinter added: "when I said that I was tired of menace, I was using a word that I didn't coin. I never thought of menace myself. It was called 'comedy of menace' quite a long time ago . I never stuck categories on myself, or on any of us . But if what I understand the word menace to mean is certain elements that I have employed in the past in the shape of a particular play, then I don't think it's worthy of much more exploration".
Despite Wardle's retraction of comedy of menace, Comedy of menace and comedies of menace caught on and have been prevalent since the late 1950s in advertisements and in critical accounts, notices, and reviews to describe Pinter's early plays and some of his later work as well. As Merritt points out, among other examples of critics' usage of this and similar categories of Pinter's work, after Gussow's 1971 "conversation" with Pinter, "Though he echoes Wardle's concept, Gussow seems to avoid using comedy of menace when reviewing the CSC Repertory Theatre's 1988 production of The Birthday Party. While still emphasizing Pinter's 'terrors' and the 'shiver beneath the laughter,' Gussow describes the play as "a play of intrigue, with an underlying motif of betrayal' … Dukore calls the play 'a comedy '".
Selected examples
''The Birthday Party'' (1958)
In discussing the first production of Pinter's first full-length play, The Birthday Party, which followed his first play, The Room, his authorised official biographer Michael Billington points out that Wardle "once excellently" described its setting, as "a banal living-room opens up to the horrors of modern history".''The Dumb Waiter'' (1960)
In Pinter's second one-act play, The Dumb Waiter, as accentuated through the 2008 film by Martin McDonagh closely resembling and markedly influenced by it, In Bruges, "Pinter conveys the idea of political terror through the staccato rhythms of music-hall cross-talk and the urban thriller: Hackney Empire cross-fertilises with Hemingway's The Killers ", one of Pinter's own acknowledged early influences, along with Franz Kafka ; Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, such as William Shakespeare, John Webster, and Cyril Tourneur, whose work his schoolmaster Joseph Brearley had introduced to him; Samuel Beckett ; and black-and-white American movies of the 1940s and 1950s."A near-perfect play about the testiness of a collapsing partnership and the divide-and-rule tactics of authority," according to Billington, The Dumb Waiter focuses on two characters, Gus and Ben; Gus is "the man who questions the agreed system and who is ultimately destroyed by his quest for meaning"; Ben, "the man who blindly obeys orders and thereby places himself at risk. ". As Pinter's The Dumb Waiter has been categorised as a "comedy of menace," so may be McDonagh's In Bruges, as it closely resembles it; yet, despite the comedy and the sense of threat growing out of the menace, these works of Pinter and McDonagh are, in Pinter's words to Billington, also "doing something which can be described as political". At the same time, had – and still has – an acute sense of the fragility of earthly happiness and of the terrors that haunt us even from infancy".
The "punning title" of The Dumb Waiter, Billington observes, "carries several layers of meaning": "It obviously refers to the antique serving-hatch that despatches ever more grotesque orders for food to these bickering gunmen"—the dumbwaiter; "But it also applies to Gus, who, troubled by the nature of the mission to realise he is its chosen target; or, indeed to Ben, who, by his total obedience to a higher authority that forces him to eliminate his partner, exposes his own vulnerability". As Gus "dumbly" awaits his fate, he may be a subservient partner who awaits orders from the "senior partner" Ben, but Ben too is subservient to The Powers That Be, a contemporary variation on Deus ex machina, manipulating both the mechanical dumbwaiter and them through its increasingly extravagant and thus comically inconvenient "orders" for increasingly exotic dishes, unnerving both of them.
Billington adds:
This being Pinter, the play has a metaphorical openness. You can interpret it as an Absurdist comedy – a kind of Godot in Birmingham – about two men passing the time in a universe without meaning or purpose. You can see it as a cry of protest against a whimsically cruel God who treats man as His plaything – even the twelve matches that are mysteriously pushed under the door have been invested with religious significance . But it makes much more sense if seen as a play about the dynamics of power and the nature of partnership. Ben and Gus are both victims of some unseen authority and a surrogate married couple quarrelling, testing, talking past each other and raking over old times.
The comedy in this "comedy of menace" often derives from such arguments between Gus and Ben, especially the one that occurs when "Ben tells Gus to go and light the kettle," a "semantic nit-picking that is a standard part of music-hall comedy": "All the great stage and film double acts – Jewel and Warriss, Abbott and Costello – fall into this kind of verbal worrying in which the bullying 'male' straight man issues instructions which are questioned by the more literal-minded 'female' partner" —
As Billington observes further,
This kind of comic pedantry has precise echoes of the great Sid Field – ironically a Birmingham comic – who had a famous sketch in which he played a virgin of the greens being hectored by Jerry Desmonde's golf pro who would cry, in exasperation, 'When I say "Slowly Back" I don't mean "Slowly Back", I mean "Slowly Back." ' At another moment, the bullying pro would tell the hapless Sid to get behind the ball and he would vainly protest 'But it's behind all round it'. But, where in a music-hall sketch this kind of semantic by-play was its own justification, in Pinter it becomes a crucial part of the power-structure. … The pay-off comes when Gus, having dogmatically insisted that the accurate phrase is 'put on the kettle', suddenly finds an irritated Ben adopting the right usage.
"Everything" in The Dumb Waiter, Billington observes, "contributes towards a necessary end"; for, "the image, as Pete says in The Dwarfs, stands in exact correspondence and relation to the idea". In this example, the central image and central metaphor, the dumbwaiter, while "despatching ever more unlikely orders," serves as "both a visual gag and a metaphor for manipulative authority", and therein lies its menace. When Ben instructs Gus verbally, while practicing their "routine" for killing their next victim, he leaves out the most important line, which instructs Gus to "take out" his "gun":
The crucial significance of the omission becomes clear only at the very end of the play, when "Gus enters through the door stage-right – the one marked for the intended victim – stripped of his gun and holster"; it becomes clear that he is going to be "Ben's target", as Ben's "revolver levelled at the door", though the play ends before Ben fires any shot.