Expressionism and Harold Pinters Plays Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Expressionism and Harold Pinters Plays - Essay ExampleExpressionism is the term used to define many different pieces of artwork including paintings, sculptures, film and plays, that in some way discolour reality for emotional effect. Painters can use expressionist techniques to blur solid lines, play with light or change the facial features on a portraying so that the viewer gets a real sense of the emotion of the piece fear, despair, love (Murphy, 1999, 40). By working with expressionist techniques instead of using realism, many artists nip more capable of portraying the proper feeling of their pieces than if everything were to appear perfectly lifelike. Expressionism is meant to dig beneath a realistic surface and expose what lies beneath.In terms of the airfield, most primal expressionist plays are credited to German playwrights of the early 20th century. Writers such as Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller were two of the most successful early expressionistic playwrights their inf luence quickly spread to other countries including America where this style of theatre was considered very trendy in the 1920s (Valgamae, 1972, 1-15). Plays such as these relied heavily on the ability of the actors as they were often scripted to over-dramatise emotional states and to literalise metaphor many expressionistic plays focused on the dramatisation of a protagonists spiritual wake or suffering. A good example of an expressionist play can be found in Oskar Kokoschkas 1909 Murderer, The Hope of Women. In this production, Kokoschkas characters remain unnamed throughout in an effort to focus the attentions of the audience to the more obscure themes. The Man and the Woman are engaged in a power struggle and during the course of instruction of the play Man brands Women, who in turn imprisons Man (1909). The entire play is set up as a purely connotative and emotional facial expression at what might well be a normal relationship between a man and a woman. Like other expressioni st forms of art, theatre focuses on the reality behind the everyday, and achieves this with the use of literalism, metaphor and hyperbole. Harold PinterPinter is an English playwright who has been active for several decades in various facets of the writing world. Aside from writing 29 well-received stage plays, he has written 26 screenplays and a myriad of radio and television plays as well as having acted on stage himself. Pinter began his writing race as a teenage poet, but soon found himself on stage in the 1950s he enjoyed an acting career under the name David exponent but eventually writing overtook his desire to pursue acting. His playwriting is very unorthodox in both Pinters approach as a writer and in its demonstration on stage these plays earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 (Peacock, 1997, 13-33).Pinter has been politically active since he became a conscientious objector at 18 since so the writer has participated in the UKs Campaign for Nuclear Disarmamen t, the British Anti-Apartheid Movement and the Playwrights in Apartheid Protest. He has been very active in International PEN (International Poets, Essayists and Novelists), a radical of diverse writers from around the world who promote the use of literature in crossing cultural borders. Currently Pinter is a member of the Cuban Solidarity