At the very beginning there is the structure. The structure is a skeleton, the premise, the base on which the flesh is arranged, systematically, so that a body maybe created. It may not always make itself palpable but if there is a structure then there must also be a center. A structure without a center is both incomplete and dysfunctional. This is because the lack of a center deludes the very purpose of organization the structure is meant to serve. The center maintains this strict level of organization in a variety of ways. For the purpose it not just ‘orients' and ‘balances' the structure, but also effectively reduces or ‘limits' the extent of ‘play' in it. The center therefore is a reductionist tool. Its inherent purpose is at the level of ‘reducing' or ‘neutralizing'.
[...] She is undoubtedly not untroubled by the greeting she has just received from father-in-law (Max) but in classic Pinter style she holds on to her mask tightly and shows nothing. Peter Hall insists that this masquerade is what finally stirs the audience. ‘It's not the mask' he clarifies not the control, but what's underneath, that's what upsets them, that's what terrifies and moves them'. Pinter makes no attempt to lay this underbelly bare in front of his audience. Hence, he merely suggests and effectively cajoles his audience into a supposition. [...]
[...] BILL goes to the cigarette box and lights a cigarette. Is she supposed to have resisted me at all?[33] Bill's deliberate pauses in this section build the power hierarchy that James effectively dislodges in the section quoted above. Here Bill's break in dialogues is a ploy used to further both James' and the audiences' anxiety. Bill's contradictory sentences are hinged together by his pauses. Thus the gaps are meant to torture James. Is he admitting his liaison with Stella? Is he denying it? [...]
[...] It wasn't easy for Pinter to make sense to an audience who were looking for sense and exactitude and hence the initial brick-bats were obvious, took me a quite a while to grow used to the fact that critical and public response in the theatre follows a very erratic temperature chart . But I think Dusseldorf cleared the air for me. In Dusseldorf about two years ago I took, as is the Continental custom, a bow with a German cast of Caretaker' at the end of the play on the first night. [...]
[...] Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.'[40] Here James is talking about the sort of play with the central element of specification that Pinter is to further in his work. Like Pinter James intends in the ‘Turn of the Screw' to initially defer and finally frustrate his readers expectations. In the meantime he, much like Pinter, plans on adding precious fuel to the fire of curiosity that he enkindles in his audiences heart. [...]
[...] If he feels it and masks it, the audience still gets it'.[29] Actors performing Pinter might initially need to reduce his characters to a melodramatic ‘whole' in order to locate their personal ‘motivations', but ultimately they too must return to his central emptiness. ‘Where Pinter on the stage goes wrong is if the actor's stop playing the game, if they actually show what they're feeling, because it becomes ludicrous . If an actor indulges himself and actually drops the mask, and says want to show the audience that I'm breaking my heart', the whole scene collapses'.[30] When the emptiness is preserved and the masks held up resolutely what the audience does feel is the frustration of ‘understanding' and yet not ‘knowing'. [...]
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