A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: English playwright who achieved international success as one of the most complex post-World War II dramatists. Harold Pinter's plays are noted for their use of silence to increase tension, understatement, and cryptic small talk. Equally recognizable are the 'Pinteresque' themes - nameless menace, erotic fantasy, obsession and jealousy, family hatred and mental disturbance. Harold Pinter was born on 10 October 1930 in Hackney, a working-class neighborhood in London's East End, the son of a Jewish dressmaker. Both of his parents were Jewish, born in England. As a child Pinter got on well with his mother, but he didn’t get on well with his father, who was a strong disciplinarian. Growing up, Pinter was met with the expressions of anti-Semitism, and has indicated its importance for his becoming a dramatist. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was evacuated from London to Cornwall at the age of nine, returning when twelve. He has said that the experience of wartime bombing has never lost its hold on him. Back in London, he attended Hackney Downs Grammar School, where he played Macbeth and Romeo among other characters in productions directed by Joseph Brearley. At school one of Pinter's main intellectual interests was English literature, particularly poetry. He also read works of Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway. This prompted him to choose a career in acting. In 1948 he was accepted at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In 1949 Pinter was fined by magistrates for having, as a conscientious objector, refused to do his national service. Pinter had two trials. Pinter's father paid the fine in the end, a substantial sum of money. In 1950 Pinter started to publish poems in Poetry (London) under the name Harold Pinta. He worked as a bit-part actor on a BBC Radio program, Focus on Football Pools. In 1951 he was accepted at the Central School of Speech and Drama and toured Ireland from 1951 to 1952 with a Shakespearean troupe. That same year, he won a place in Anew McMaster's famous Irish repertory company, renowned for its performances of Shakespeare. Pinter toured again between 1954 and 1957, using the stage name of David Baron. Between 1956 and 1980 he was married to actor Vivien Merchant. In 1980 he married the author and historian Lady Antonia Fraser. In 1957 Pinter completed two one-act plays, The Room and The Dumb Waiter, as well as the full-length play The Birthday Party, which closed with disastrous reviews after one week but later one of his most performed plays, that dealt in a Kafkaesque manner with an apparently ordinary man who is threatened by strangers for an unknown reason. The relationship of villain and victim emerges gradually in all three of these plays. In The Dumb Waiter two hired gunmen experience strange terrors while receiving orders delivered via a dumb waiter shaft until one performs the assigned task by killing the other. Pinter adapted his radio play A Slight Ache (1959), about a wife who exchanges a stranger for her husband, from his short story "The Examination" and later made it into a stage play. He next wrote two revue sketches, Pieces of Eight and One to Another. Another radio play, A Night Out (1960), followed. Pinter's first West End success was The Caretaker in 1960 (adapted for film in 1962). In it, a devious old tramp is befriended and sheltered in his cluttered room by the kindly Aston until his calculating brother ousts the would-be caretaker. Night School appeared on radio the same year, depicting two aunts mothering Walter as he pursues a tart who has rented his room while he has been in prison. The Caretaker was followed by The Collection (1962), The Dwarfs (1963), and The Lover (1963). The Dwarfs, derived from Pinter's novel, also first appeared on radio in 1960. It presents a pair of threatening figures cruelly descending upon the hapless Len with his disintegrating fantasies about ghoulish dwarfs. The Collection expresses a husband's fears of his wife's infidelity with one of a pair of men in an adjoining apartment. In The Lover a jaded married couple seek sexual stimulus in role playing. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) broadcast his short story "The Tea Party" in 1964 and televised it throughout Europe the following year. In Pinter's full-length play The Homecoming (1965) the theme of sexual cruelty reappears. The Homecoming is perhaps the most enigmatic of all Pinter's early works. It won a Tony Award, the Whitbread Anglo-American Theater Award, and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. In the story an estranged son, Teddy, brings his wife Ruth home to London to meet his family, his father Max, a nagging, aggressive ex-butcher, and other tough members of the all-male household. At the end Teddy returns alone to his university job in America. Ruth stays as a mother or whore to his family. Everyone needs her. Several of Pinter's plays were originally written for British radio or TV. In the 1960s he also directed several of his dramas. After Betrayal (1978) Pinter wrote no new full-length plays until Moonlight (1994). Short plays include A Kind of Alaska (1982), inspired by the case histories in Oliver Sack's Awakenings (1973). BBC television produced Pinter's The Basement (originally a film script entitled The Compartment) in 1967. The following year he wrote three one-act plays: Landscape, an exchange of reminiscences in non-connecting monologues between two old people; Silence, which mixed a three-person monologue and dialogue in a kind of dramatic poem; and the funny sketch Night. His full-length drama Old Times (1971) has no plot; it is a play about the past. The three characters spend an evening reminiscing about events that may or may not have occurred. Harold Pinter is generally seen as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century. That he occupies a position as a modern classic is illustrated by his name entering the language as an adjective used to describe a particular atmosphere and environment in drama: "Pinteresque". Pinter restored theatre to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretence crumbles. With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution. Pinter's drama was first perceived as a variation of absurd theatre, but has later more aptly been characterised as "comedy of menace", a genre where the writer allows us to eavesdrop on the play of domination and submission hidden in the most mundane of conversations. In a typical Pinter play, we meet people defending themselves against intrusion or their own impulses by entrenching themselves in a reduced and controlled existence. Another principal theme is the volatility and elusiveness of the past. Pinter's major plays originate often from a single, powerful visual image. They are usually set in a single room, whose occupants are threatened by forces or people whose precise intentions neither the characters nor the audience can define. The struggle for survival or identity dominates the action of his characters. Language is not only used as a means of communication but as a weapon. Beneth the words, there is a silence of fear, rage and domination, fear of intimacy. Pinter refuses to provide rational justifications for action, but offers existential glimpses of bizarre or terrible moments in people's lives. It is said of Harold Pinter that following an initial period of psychological realism he proceeded to a second, more lyrical phase with plays such as Landscape and Silence and finally to a third, political phase with One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), The New World Order (1991) and other plays. But this division into periods seems oversimplified and ignores some of his strongest writing, such as No Man's Land (1974) and Ashes to Ashes (1996). In fact, the continuity in his work is remarkable, and his political themes can be seen as a development of the early Pinter's analysing of threat and injustice. Since 1973, Pinter has won recognition as a fighter for human rights, alongside his writing. He has often taken stands seen as controversial. Pinter has also written radio plays and screenplays for film and television. Among his best-known screenplays are those for The Servant (1963), The Accident (1967), The Go-Between (1971), The Last Tycoon (1974, dir. by Elia Kazan), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981, novel by John Fowles), Betrayal (1982), Turtle Diary (1985), Reunion (1989), The Handmaid's Tale (1990), The Comfort of Strangers (1990), and The Trial by Franz Kafka (1990). From the 1970s Pinter has directed a number of stage plays and the American Film Theatre production of Butler (1974). In 1977 he published a screenplay based on Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Closely associated with the director Peter Hall, in 1973 he became an associate director of the National Theatre after Hall was nominated as the successor of Sir Lawrence Olivier, a post he would hold until 1983. Pinter has received many awards, including the Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear in 1963, BAFTA awards in 1965 and in 1971, the Hamburg Shakespeare Prize in 1970, the Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or in 1971, and the Commonwealth Award in 1981. He was awarded a CBE in 1966, but he later turned down John Major's offer of a knighthood. In 1996 he was given the Laurence Olivier Award for a lifetime's achievement in the theatre. In 2002 he was made a Companion of Honour for services to literature. In 2005, Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Pinter was married from 1956 to the actress Vivien Merchant. For a time, they lived in Notting Hill Gate in a slum. Eventually Pinter managed to borrow some money and move away. Although Pinter said in an interview in 1966, that he never has written any part for any actor, his wife Vivien frequently appeared in his plays. After his first marriage dissolved in 1980, Pinter married the biographer Lady Antonia Fraser. Vivien Merchant died in 1982. The divorce separated Pinter from his son Daniel, a writer and musician. In the 1990s Pinter became more active as a director than as a playwright. He oversaw David Mamet's Oleanna and several works by Simon Gray. Since the overthrow of Chile's President Allende in 1973, Pinter was active in human rights issues. His opinions were often controversial. During the Kosovo crisis in 1999, Pinter condemned Nato's intervention. In 2001 Pinter joined The International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, which also included former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. In January 2002 Pinter was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus. In February 2005 Pinter announced in an interview that he has decided to abandon his career as a playwright and put all his energy into politics. He died on December 24, 2008, in London. |
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