Mode of Metatheater: The Mixture of Comic and Tragic in Harold Pinter’s Dumb Waiter

Abstract

The term metatheater is coined by Lionel Abel in 1963 which refers to theater about theater. It draws attention to the distinction between the fiction of the play and the reality of performance. A play refers to itself as a play to encourage the audience to perceive it in two ways; as a pretended reality and as dramatic artifice. Metatheater also appears in both comedy and tragedy, where the audience can laugh and empathize at the same time. The paradoxical perspective of fake and real promoting audience instability and this is the role of metatheater. The conflict between illusion and reality is the bases of both the subject matter and the dramatic technique of the plays of Harold Pinter who is a revolutionary British playwright. This study examines Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter (1959) in the light metatheatrical mode. The main concern of this study concentrates on Pinter’s technique of mixing comedy and tragedy, how in this comedy Pinter leads the audience to the tragic sense, presenting a tragedy in modern absurd way.