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As a blade is sharpened on a grindstone, Genet has defined himself against society. In a world where many people can scarcely explain what they do, a crime is at least a visible and dramatic act. Genet is the total theatrician in that he revels in making illusion indistinguishable from reality. Are the generals, bishops and judges in the brothel of The Balcony more real when they put on those costumes to gratify their sexual quirks or when they assume the same roles to govern the state? In Genet's drama, costumes not only make the man, they rule the world.
Like Genet, John Osborne is nauseated by society, but he is less ambiguous and symbolic, more direct and realistic. There is more than a trace of Captain Bligh in him, except that he is both martinet and mutineer. He reads the riot act to his times in the accents of self-hatred. Bill Maitland says, "I myself am more packed with spite and twitching with revenge than anyone I know of. I actually often, frequently, daily want to see people die for their errors. I wish to kill them myself, to throw the switch with my own fist." There is little that Osborne does not abominate. With passion, grief, and hysteria, he records the unease of all the 20th century's displaced men.
If Osborne is a frenetic machine gunner with words, Harold Pinter is the coolest of snipers. The rooms in which most of Pinter's plays take place crackle with laconic menace. In The Birthday Party, which has echoes of Hemingway's The Killers, two agents come to a rooming house, rough up one of the lodgers, and then take him for a ride. No explanation. Pinter knows that violence is more terrifying without reasons. No victim knows his hour, no executioner the source of his orders.
Riddled with guilt and anxiety, Pinter's people are Kafkaesque in that they cannot evade, placate, or even contact the unseen powers. He deals in archetypes that subtly evoke family figures, fathers and sons, brothers and sisters. The two brothers who take in and then evict the scrofulous bum in The Caretaker might be doing it to their own father. Pinter's characters are both strange and familiar with one another, as members of a family are. There is a trace of incest in his plays, and his characters take cover behind a smoke screen of language that is outwardly lucid and inwardly impenetrable. Pinter is the master of remaining incommunicado while talking, of suggesting how people keep each other at a distance with words.
Contemporary dramatic art is not only profoundly pessimistic but radically new in form. The well-made play with a beginning, a middle and an end is a thing of the past. It presupposes the leisure time of a leisure class, the idea of steady evolutionary progress and the information speed, as Marshall McLuhan has pointed out, of a railway system. Great Expectations epitomizes a 19th century mood, just as No exit reflects a 20th century mood. The well-made play assumes that everything is a problem capable of solution, as in a detective story.