Abstract In Harold Pinter’s last completed project before his death, a screen adaptation of Anthony Shaffer’s play Sleuth (1970), a large publicity poster dominates the study of crime novelist Andrew Wyke, describing him as ‘the master of menace.’ This is also a self-referential joke directed at Pinter’s association with ‘comedies of menace,’ such as A Slight Ache (1957) and The Birthday Party (1958), that succeeded in creating feelings of unease and discomfort in ways that had not been seen in the theatre before. As a repertory actor before he became a dramatist, Pinter was likely to have encountered the fears and insecurities that theatre can create, and these perhaps return in the sinister environments that we find in his early plays. In turn, the queasiness and growing unease we encounter in Pinter’s drama has been appropriated by other ‘childe Harolds’ including Philip Ridley, Anthony Neilson, Martin Crimp, and Jez Butterworth, whose work follows variations of the Pinteresque. This article looks at some of the ways these dramatists have developed on from Pinter’s template of creating a sense of unease, yet at the same time these dramatists show an awareness of how the nature of fear has radically altered since the turn of the millennium. Signs of this change can also be found in Pinter’s work from the 1980 s: whereas previously fear had been vague in its aetiology, now it came out of the shadows to be named: Pinter’s ‘comedies of menace’ gave way to plays about torture by repressive political regimes in Party Time (1991) and memories of the Holocaust in Ashes to Ashes (1997). Since then the depiction of states of fear have forked off on two separate paths: latter day ‘childe Harolds’ such as Philip Ridley continue to promote what he has called ‘theatre as a ghost train,’ a place of disorientation designed to induce fear for its own sake, while a larger contingent that include Simon Stephens, Duncan Macmillan, Mike Bartlett, Martin Crimp, and Mark Ravenhill also make fears manifest: these include terrorism and the ensuing War on Terror, the Anthropocene and climate change and the precarity and repression of neo-liberal economies and the alienation of self-hood through technology.

中文翻译：

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威胁大师（和情妇）

摘要 在 Harold Pinter 生前最后完成的项目中，Anthony Shaffer 的剧本 Sleuth (1970) 的银幕改编，一张大的宣传海报在犯罪小说家 Andrew Wyke 的研究中占据主导地位，将他描述为“威胁大师”。这也是一个自我指涉的笑话，针对品特与“威胁喜剧”的联系，例如《轻微的疼痛》（1957 年）和《生日派对》（1958 年），这些喜剧以前所未有的方式成功地制造了不安和不适感。之前在剧场看过。在成为剧作家之前，作为一名剧目演员，品特很可能遇到了戏剧可能带来的恐惧和不安全感，而这些可能会在我们在他早期戏剧中发现的险恶环境中回归。反过来，我们在品特的戏剧中遇到的不安和日益增长的不安已经被其他“哈罗德公子”所采用，包括菲利普·雷德利、安东尼·尼尔森、马丁·克林普和杰兹·巴特沃斯，他们的作品遵循了品特风格的变体。本文着眼于这些剧作家从品特创造不安感的模板中发展起来的一些方式，但与此同时，这些剧作家也意识到了自千禧年以来恐惧的本质如何发生了根本性的变化。这种变化的迹象也可以在品特 1980 年代的作品中找到：虽然以前恐惧的病因模糊不清，但现在它从阴影中走出来并被命名：品特的“威胁喜剧”让位于关于酷刑的戏剧党时间（1991 年）中的压制性政治体制和《灰烬归零》（1997 年）中的大屠杀记忆。