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“Jury Duty” is a short work of fiction about a woman who thinks she will do an excellent job on a jury but finds herself outfoxed and uncertain. Harold Pinter is her hero, but where has he gone?

In Pat Barker’s 200i novel Border Crossing, the drama of the double comes fully to life. Tom Seymour, a psychologist who works with children who have committed criminal acts, is contemplating treating a young man whom he helped send away when he was ten. Remembering a time when he was close to Danny (a child murderer) in age, and only by luck was prevented from murdering a very young child in his care, he feels a special affinity with his patient. When Danny suggests that perhaps Tom needs the time with him as much as Danny needs it, Tom becomes very defensive, and Danny explains: “I’m sorry. I need this very badly … I don’t always know how to distinguish between what I’m feeling and what other people are feeling. I seem to be—:’ Tom queries, `Permeable?”’ As the title of the book suggests, the borders are too easily crossed by these two, permeable indeed.

British playwright Harold Pinter iS, of course, known for what his plays don’t say, the strategic placing of pauses, the arresting indications of silence, the subtext working with great force beneath the text. “So often,” he notes, “below the words spoken, is the thing known and unspoken.”1 Although his plays have a surface degree of realism, they are often informed by ritual patterns and mythic undertones. In his one-act play, A Slight

One of Hedda Gabler’s possible doubles, as noted in chapter 5, is Hecate. In Greek mythology, Hecate is often discussed as a part of the Demeter/Persephone/Hecate trio (both Hecate and Persephone are often considered to be queen of the underworld), all really aspects of one goddess. Hedda, however, remains cut off from her Demeter/Persephone side. But in Samuel Beckett’s dramas, we find the whole array. Ironical, perhaps, that a playwright known for his laconic style should go beyond the double

IF Beckett explores the difficulties Of integrating the Demeter and Persephone aspects of his characters in the three plays discussed in the former chapter, Marsha Norman in her Pulitzer Prize-winning play, ‘night, Mother, takes up a similar torch. Departing from an overt dramatization of a split self in an earlier drama, Getting Out (1977), in which Norman explores the relationship between Arlene, newly released from prison, and her earlier, juvenile delinquent self, Arlie, the author offers in ‘night, Mother a dramatization of doubling between mother and daughter that leads to a character integration her earlier heroine sought in vain.

CHAPTER 2 focused on how the myth of Narcissus and the psychological condition of narcissism work in a novel and two plays in ways that help one to understand their use of doubling. But as promised in the Introduction, the myths under consideration often overlap as they inform works of literature that involve doubling. In this chapter, I will consider the way the myth of Dionysus overlaps with the Myth of Narcissus to reveal the nature of the doubling in an ancient Greek play and a contemporary film.

Joseph Conrad Offers a classic example of doubling in his short story, “The Secret Sharer.” His original title for the story was “The Second Self” or “The Other Self.” It has been called an adventure in transformation, “wherein an uncanny other turns out to be a second self, a sharer (and bearer) of intimate anxieties, repressed energies, dark impulses.”1 Another work in which he presents doubling in a fascinating manner is his short novel, The Nigger of the Narcissus.

Long considered the father of modern drama, Henrick Ibsen’s plays remain amazingly current. Whether dealing with corruption in government (The Enemy of the People), the need to hang onto our illusions (The Wild Duck), or the need for women to assert themselves in what remains, on the whole, a male-dominated world (A Doll’s House), Ibsen offers a keen insight into the fabric of modern life in all of his dramas.

The myths of Dionysus and Narcissus overlap as well as they inform the doubling in English playwright Harold Pinter’s 1999 film The Comfort of Strangers.1 Pinter’s film has strong structural and thematic echoes of Thomas Mann’s story, “Death in Venice,” and is an adaptation of the 1981 novel, The Comfort of Strangers, by Ian McEwan.2 As in The Crying Game, water plays its role in this beautiful and haunting film, as Venice becomes a veritable Narcissus pool for the young lovers, Colin and Mary, in which they may gaze at their own beauty. However, they are not alone.

Emerging as a dramatic presence on the British stage in the 1970s, Pam Gems has contributed her many talents to that scene and beyond ever since.1Lyn Gardner even calls her ‘the grand dame of British Theatre’,2 partly because, despite Caryl Churchill’s successes in America, Gems is the one who found her way onto the West End stages of the British establishment and has been a prolific contributor to that scene since, writing some twenty plays in ten years for it. As part of what John Russell Brown has called the second wave of contemporary British playwrights, comprising the political, the fringe, and women’s theatre, her work has been involved with all aspects of that wave.3 The politics of her plays are more focused than that of the first wave, ushered in by John Osborne’s 1956 production of Look Back in Anger, and it is the particular mixture of the personal and the political that marks her contributions to the dramatic scene.

THE DRAMA OF HAROLD PINTER EVOLVES in an atmosphere of mystery. While the surface of life is realistically detailed, the patterns that lie below the surface are as obscure as the motives of the characters, the pause, as prominent and suggestive as the dialogue. "The more acute the experience the less articulate its expression," is the author's own defense of his technique, a technique that he uses to heighten the sense of mystery and of menace in A Slight Ache. Still, the audience experiencing Pinter's "comedy of menace" is not simply thrust into the world of a nameless terror and left there. Although Pinter is unwilling to explain the mysteries in his dramas and is impatient with critics who seek to pin down his meanings, a close examination of his plays reveals their careful structure and precise use of symbol. At the same time that his art reflects the mysterious universe as he perceives it, it also attempts to approach the mystery that it reflects.

The uneasy critical response that has greeted Simon Gray's Butley (1971) and Otherwise Engaged (1975) seems to stem from a distaste for their central characters, the aggressively cynical Ben Butley and the ostentatiously passive Simon Hench. John Russell Taylor, for example, may admit that he harbors some sympathy for Butley as an outcast, but only because Butley gets what he deserves.' And Simon Hench, Taylor suspects, may have achieved "philosophical calm" or may simply have "declined into the passivity of a dead object."2 While few ignore the Shavian wit that Simon Gray provides for his heroes to spout, the plays have been appreciated more as vehicles for the acting abilities of Alan Bates than as serious contributions to the drama of our time.