At one point in British cultural history, the heritage of Laurence Sterne split into two paths: one became modernist fragmentation (Woolf, Joyce), the other became the “nonsense” tradition (Lear, Carroll, Monty Python).

The other path — the one theatre followed — sits between those two poles: not modernism’s inward spiral, not nonsense’s pure play, but the social absurd. Somewhere between these two currents emerged a dramaturgy of anti-communication, a formalism of sociality under stress, a world — quite simply — of "two silences. One when no word is spoken... the speech we hear is an indication of that which we don’t hear.” (Pinter, 1962)

What can we learn from Post-war Britain's subject notions of logic and artistic structure? The Swiss writer Max Frisch once said that if he were a dictator, he would permit only productions of Ionesco because "the more absurd the action on the stage becomes, the more natural and acceptable reality will seem to us." It is obvious to us now that this is not true: rather, that the more absurd reality becomes, the less space we have left to recognise absurdity as form.

We are bombarded daily by a quantity of images, sounds, and colours that would have been inconceivable a century ago, and a lot of contemporary culture responds with a kind of reflexive, post-internet Dadaism: brain-rot collage, anachronistic spectacle, selfie museums. But where that overstimulation often functions as anaesthetic, abursdism works in reverse: it forces attention onto the gap, asking you to manufacture sense from the implied, the unsaid, the insinuated. A Pinter pause, whether it lasts a second or a quarter hour, forces you to extrapolate meaning from the lack of stimuli. This is the fundamental opposite of the post-internet ethos, which overstimulates you while telling you that nothing matters.

By putting these works back in conversation with contemporary culture, the pause aims to stage the absurd as, if not a solution to the post-internet age, at the very least a diagnostic.