Harold Pinter: The Theatre of Power

The book focuses on Pinter's continuously innovative experiments in theatrical form while it traces the recurrence in his work of a consistent set of ethical and epistemological concerns. Exploring important plays from the writer's career, I argue that the motivating force in almost all of Pinter's drama is the ceaseless desire for power, represented in his work as a compulsive drive to achieve or maintain dominance - whether it be the struggle to defend one's own territory from intruders, the father's battle with his sons to assert his patriarchal position in the family, the manipulation of erotic feelings in the gender warfare that motivates sexual relationships, the abuse of brute force by dictatorships and democracies, or simply the masculine obsession to dominate.