The Hothouse Play Analysis

For Pinter, the 1980s was a period when he shifted his attention to overtly political issues. The discarded play, The Hothouse, written in 1958, took twenty years to be performed on the stage in 1980 was considered as a shift in Pinter’s temperament. The Hothouse in Mark Batty’s words is indicative of “clash between institutional dogma and individual freedoms” (About Pinter, 63). Pinter neither followed the conventional theatrical forms in which kitchen sink dramatists or angry young men had established, nor assimilated with contemporary British political drama which was fashioned by Marxist radicals such as David Hare, David Edgar and Howard Brenton. He instead in his so-called political plays has been trying to portray the abuse of power,

One year later, at a dinner party in a conversation with some Turkish guests on use of torture, he wrote One for a Road, the play Pinter claims that he has written in anger. This short play was a bridge to link his politics to his art. Pinter as a citizen and as an activist engaged seriously in social issues and started explicitly to condemn the policy of Western governments in connection with human rights and injustice. He, along with Arthur Miller, the vice president of American PEN, spent five days in Turkey in sympathy with dissident writers. Pinter also became President of the Friends of Turkey in UK. Such active involvement in political issues propelled him in writing The Mountain Language in 1988. The play offers suppression of any views in contrast with political orthodoxy. Pinter asserts to Mel Gussow that this play is about the suppression of language, and to him it is as relevant in England as it is in Turkey (Conversation with Pinter, 85). The main concern for Pinter in the creation of such plays was a protest against injustice and demonstration about the abuse of

He adds that authors are responsible for being attentive to the social and political context of their time. Rushdie's essay was a response to George Orwell's essay Inside the Whale, in which the whale was metaphorically portrayed with the intention of allowing authors to keep out of politics. Orwell like Auden, who believed poetry cannot bring change, was in favour of quietism. Thus, Pinter, like Rushdie was eager to enter in the public arena and take an action. However, in Billington’s view, this attitude of Pinter is “proof of neither political naivety nor creative bankruptcy” (Harold Pinter,