High-Heeled Shoes and Bongo Drums: Ritual as a Dramatic Convention in Harold Pinter's The Lover

Abstract How might playwrights use ritual as a dramatic convention, separate from its primitive history, to explore a character's place in society? This article analyzes Harold Pinter's employment of ritual in The Lover (1963) and argues that his characters rely on ritualized games to act upon their sexual desires in a “respectable” society—England before the sexual revolution. The Lover explores the lives of a married couple, Richard and Sarah, living in a suburb outside of London. Sarah is having an affair with her husband's alter ego, “Max.” Throughout the play, Richard and Sarah establish that their roles as spouse and lover must remain separate entities. They play a series of role-playing sex games until the rules of the ritual are violated and their arrangement is adjusted. By situating ritual as a dramatic convention within The Lover, Pinter demonstrates the lengths that people might go to survive within a restrictive environment.