Goldberg and McCann

Question 1

Pinter on Goldberg

Answer 1

‘archetypal Jewish swindler’

Question 2

Pinter on McCann

Answer 2

‘archetypal Irish terrorist’

Question 3

Katherine Worth on Goldberg’s use of false voices

Answer 3

Pinter uses false voices ‘to convey the terrible sense of non-identity and disconnectedness’ that almost all his characters experience

Question 4

Irving Wardle on McCann’s newspaper strips

Answer 4

‘introducing an intrinsically theatrical idea and letting it find its own road back towards common sense’ - lets the action lead back to the theme of menace, rather than embodying the theme in action

Question 5

A View of the Party

Answer 5

Poem Pinter wrote about TBP in 1958
‘For Stanley had no home / Only where Goldberg was, / And his bloodhound McCann / Did Stanley remember his name.’ - suggests that Goldberg functions dramatically as part of Stanley’s consciousness and highlights how their identities, fluid as they are, seem to be tied up in each other

Question 6

Katherine Worth on the conflicting nature of G+M’s dramatic representation

Answer 6

They are both ‘a projection of Stanley’s obscure dread’ but also seem ‘real’ which is what makes them ‘so alarming’

Question 7

Michael Billington on G+M’s role reversal

Answer 7

‘the oppressors are themselves victims of larger forces’

Two of the most oppressed communities historically – Irish and Jewish – become the tormentors

Question 8

Michael Billington on G+M as symbolic representations of society

Answer 8

‘He makes Goldberg and McCann the visible symbols of an established order that demands total submission’

Question 9

Lloyd Evans on the interrogation scene

Answer 9

‘nothing more than a repetitive and humourless chunk of verbal slapstick’

Question 10

Pinter on Goldberg and McCann and society

Answer 10

‘Goldberg and McCann? Dying, rotting scabrous, the decayed spiders, the flower of our society’

Question 11

Pinter on Goldberg and McCann’s purpose

Answer 11

‘They had come with a purpose, a job in hand – to take Stanley away. This they did. Meg unknowing, Petey helpless, Stanley sucked in. Play over.’

Question 12

Pinter on Goldberg and McCann’s role as representations of a Judeo-Christain tradition

Answer 12

TBP shows ‘how religious forces ruin our lives’ – Pinter explains the role of Goldberg and McCann who represent a Judeo-Christian tradition which demands conformity towards family, state and church

Question 13

Martin Esslin on G+M (organisation)

Answer 13

‘emissaries of some secret organisation he has betrayed’
yes - ‘why did you betray us?’
no - meaninglessness of the interrogation undermines the integrity of this one question

Question 14

Martin Esslin on G+M (nurses)

Answer 14

‘male nurses set out to fetch him back to an asylum’

yes - medical reconstruction imagery, Stanley’s instability and volatility prior to G+M coming, seems almost agoraphobic

Question 15

Martin Esslin on G+M (outsiders)

Answer 15

‘emissaries from another world’
yes - outsiders, come from another culture
yes - aliens, strange rituals (‘give me a blow’) and unstable identities

Question 16

Martin Esslin on G+M (angels)

Answer 16

‘dark angels of nothingness’
yes - existential meaninglessness of their words, shifting identities
no - seems to be a concrete organisation and purpose behind them

Question 17

Bill Naismith on G+M

Answer 17

‘agents of justice’
yes - in the interrogation Stanley seems to have committed some sort of sexual crime, reconstruction list creates the sense that he needs to be rehabilitated
no - treatment of Meg and Lulu, torture (potentially cutting out Stanley’s tongue)

Question 18

Outsider nature of Goldberg and McCann

Answer 18

Audience may initially laugh at Goldberg and McCann as they are such stereotypical outsiders - relatively mono-cultural British society at this time