The Girardian Economy of Desire

In the last chapter of The Rise and Fall of the Well-Made Play John Russell Taylor notes that the Pinter play (although he singles out The Birthday Party he could as well be referring to Old Times) is essentially a drawing-room drama complete in every detail, ... except that the exposition is left out altogether .. He then goes on to observe how the similarity breaks down, that is the process that interests Pinter, the series of happenings, and not the precise whys and wherefores. These are totally incoherent, as necessarily they have to be in so much of life, where no explanations are offered and we must make the best we can of it. The similarity which Taylor describes between the Pinter play and the drawing-room drama suggests the debt that Pinter owes both to the well-made play of Scribe and the psychological drama of Ibsen.' For Taylor, however, the obvious structural, thematic and linguistic affinities only serve to distinguish Pinter's work from the nineteenthcentury tradition out of which it issues and with which it breaks. This rupture is seen

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