SOURCE: “A Kind of Alaska: Pinter and Pygmalion,” in Classical and Modern Literature, Vol. 16, No. 3, Spring, 1996, pp. 231-40.

In the following essay, Knowles explores Pinter's use of the Pygmalion-Galatea myth as a theme in several of his plays.

The printed text of A Kind of Alaska¹ is preceded by a note indicating the source for the play, Dr. Oliver Sacks's book Awakenings, published in 1973. Awakenings records case histories of sufferers of sleeping sickness, encephalitis lethargica, who were treated with the drug L-DOPA which brought them back to life after decades in a trance-like limbo. Pinter took some details from the case of “Rose R.”²

“Rose R” was a New Yorker, born in 1905, who lived an adventurous partying life until the age of twenty-one when in 1926 she was struck down by what Dr. Sacks describes as a “virulent form”³ of the disease. For forty-three years “Rose R” remained in...