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. (Campton's subtitle Comedy of Menace is a jocular play-on-words derived from comedy of manners—menace being manners pronounced with somewhat of a Judeo-English accent.)[1]
Selected examples from Pinter's plays and sketches[edit]
The Birthday Party (1958)[edit]
In discussing the first production of Pinter's first full-length play, The Birthday Party (1958), which followed his first play, The Room (1957), his authorised official biographer Michael Billington points out that Wardle "once excellently" described its setting (paraphrasing Wardle), as "a banal living-room [which] opens up to the horrors of modern history" (Billington 86).
The Dumb Waiter (1960)[edit]
In his second one-act play, The Dumb Waiter (1960), 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 [1927]" (Billington 90), one of Pinter's own acknowledged early influences, along with Franz Kafka (348–49); 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 (mostly his novels [43]); and black-and-white American movies of the 1940s and 1950s.[3]
"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. (If the system can arbitrarily dispose of his partner, why not of him?)" (92). 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" (92). At the same time, [Pinter] had – and still [in 1996 through to the time of his death in 2008] has – an acute sense of the fragility of earthly happiness and of the terrors that haunt us even from infancy" (92).
The "punning title" of The Dumb Waiter, Billington observes, "carries several layers of meaning": "It obviously refers to the antique serving-hatch that despatches [sic] 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 [their next job as hitmen] 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" (89). 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: