Our Team

Audio and Visual Techniques in Harold’s Pinter’s One for the Road and Moonlight

Abstract

Since World War II, dramatic form has been in a state of constant flux due to the shifting visions of life. However, the sense of loss that the post-war man started to feel, commingled with the meaninglessness of life, especially after the shocks of war in which the world was seen primarily as a place bereft of meaning, faith and genuine will, led to the absence of any available recognized method for communication. This meant that the familiar method of communication, which is language, ceased to be functional because it has already lost its raw material, ‘meaning’. Thus, such a failure made language regarded as a token of the sense of absurdity. In this respect, language for the absurd playwrights had already been dead. So they tended to utilize other meaningful techniques to express their visions and ideas, delineating radical changes in the forms and tools of playwriting. One of these writers was Harold Pinter, who tried to employ other theatrical effects that address the eye and ear to deliver the absurd desired. By the appeal to the eye and ear, Pinter, in his two plays under the study, One for the Road and Moonlight, was not making an original innovation, rather it can be considered a revival of the basic inherent nature of theatre and drama. The current study concentrates on the playwright’s use of visual and auditory effects created by theatrical images that are mainly embodied in these plays.

Keywords: Absurdity; Harold Pinter; Moonlight; One for the Road; Visual and Audio Techniques