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Abstract: Harold Pinter is a world famous and appreciated playwright, who started his career rather unsuccessfully. As a representative of theatre of the absurd, he was faced with negative and critical reviews of his work. It is hard to say whether the reviewers did not understand his style or simply refused to understand it. However, the playwright’s new style ended up setting new boundaries in modern drama. Pinter’s plays, which were among the first to be presented on the Slovene stage received a similarly modest welcome. The audience found his long pauses, silences and incoherent dialogue insufficiently engaging, and many ended up leaving the theatre before the performance was over. One of the main reasons was that they were not familiar with this original and new writing style, which with time acquired its own adjective – ‘Pinteresque’. Throughout the world Pinter’s popularity increased more rapidly than in Slovenia, while today the playwright is not a stranger to the Slovene theatre. Pinter’s plays have been performed quite a few times on Slovene stages. The question that arises is whether reception of Pinter’s plays and his popularity among the Slovene audience has increased with time. There is a great possibility that Pinter’s popularity in Slovenia is a result of the playwright’s reception among Slovenes as well as the other way around. In this graduation thesis, we will focus on factors that have influenced a positive or negative reception of Pinter’s plays in Slovenia. In pursuit of this, we mainly focus on two events: Pinter’s receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature and his death. With the statistical data regarding Pinter’s plays staged in Slovenia after 1999, this graduation thesis will show how reviews, media presence and other factors influenced the popularity of Pinter and his plays in Slovenia, and how they simultaneously contributed to the reception and integration of the playwright’s style into the Slovene theatre, and brought the playwright closer to the Slovene public at the same time.
Keywords: Harold Pinter, theatre of the absurd, reception, popularity, play, media presence
Published in DKUM: 07.10.2015; Views: 1631; Downloads: 89
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