Abstract
This article examines the ways characters talking over or for other characters in The Birthday Party, One for the Road, and New World Order become not only a move towards oppression and hegemony, but also gradually begin to reveal the apparatus within and yet beyond the stage that rules conduct and demands performance. This gradual revelation of the way language and the voice become the site of power and control is even more evident in the film, The Comfort of Strangers, for which Pinter wrote the screenplay. Deploying the voiceover as the complement to the hidden gaze of the character, Robert, plays out the ways the voice is finally that which observes and commands. This suggests that the theater plays with a power dynamic that always threatens to turn into terror.
