Harold Pinter
born Oct. 10, 1930, London, Eng.
died Dec. 24, 2008, London
English playwright, who achieved
international renown as one of the most
complex and challenging post-World War II
dramatists. His plays are noted for their
use of understatement, small talk,
reticence—and even silence—to convey the
substance of a character’s thought, which
often lies several layers beneath, and
contradicts, his speech. In 2005 he won the
Nobel Prize for Literature.
The son of a Jewish tailor, Pinter grew
up in London’s East End in a working-class
area. He studied acting at the Royal Academy
of Dramatic Art in 1948 but left after two
terms to join a repertory company as a
professional actor. Pinter toured Ireland
and England with various acting companies,
appearing under the name David Baron in
provincial repertory theatres until 1959.
After 1956 he began to write for the stage.
The Room (first produced 1957) and The Dumb
Waiter (first produced 1959), his first two
plays, are one-act dramas that established
the mood of comic menace that was to figure
largely in his later works. His first
full-length play, The Birthday Party (first
produced 1958; filmed 1968), puzzled the
London audiences and lasted only a week, but
later it was televised and revived
successfully on the stage.
After Pinter’s radio play A Slight Ache
(first produced 1959) was adapted for the
stage (1961), his reputation was secured by
his second full-length play, The Caretaker
(first produced 1960; filmed 1963), which
established him as more than just another
practitioner of the then-popular Theatre of
the Absurd. His next major play, The
Homecoming (first produced 1965), helped
establish him as the originator of a unique
dramatic idiom. Such plays as Landscape
(first produced 1969), Silence (first
produced 1969), Night (first produced 1969),
and Old Times (first produced 1971)
virtually did away with physical activity on
the stage. Pinter’s later successes included
No Man’s Land (first produced 1975),
Betrayal (first produced 1978), Moonlight
(first produced 1993), and Celebration
(first produced 2000). From the 1970s on,
Pinter did much directing of both his own
and others’ works.
Pinter’s plays are ambivalent in their
plots, presentation of characters, and
endings, but they are works of undeniable
power and originality. They typically begin
with a pair of characters whose stereotyped
relations and role-playing are disrupted by
the entrance of a stranger; the audience
sees the psychic stability of the couple
break down as their fears, jealousies,
hatreds, sexual preoccupations, and
loneliness emerge from beneath a screen of
bizarre yet commonplace conversation. In The
Caretaker, for instance, a wheedling,
garrulous old tramp comes to live with two
neurotic brothers, one of whom underwent
electroshock therapy as a mental patient.
The tramp’s attempts to establish himself in
the household upset the precarious balance
of the brothers’ lives, and they end up
evicting him. The Homecoming focuses on the
return to his London home of a university
professor who brings his wife to meet his
brothers and father. The woman’s presence
exposes a tangle of rage and confused
sexuality in this all-male household, but in
the end she decides to stay with the father
and his two sons after having accepted their
sexual overtures without protest from her
overly detached husband.
Dialogue is of central importance in
Pinter’s plays and is perhaps the key to his
originality. His characters’ colloquial (“Pinteresque”)
speech consists of disjointed and oddly
ambivalent conversation that is punctuated
by resonant silences. The characters’
speech, hesitations, and pauses reveal not
only their own alienation and the
difficulties they have in communicating but
also the many layers of meaning that can be
contained in even the most innocuous
statements.
In addition to works for the stage,
Pinter wrote radio and television dramas and
a number of successful motion-picture
screenplays. Among the latter are those for
three films directed by Joseph Losey, The
Servant (1963), Accident (1967), and The
Go-Between (1970). He also wrote the
screenplays for The Last Tycoon (1976), The
French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), the screen
version of his own play Betrayal (1983), The
Handmaid’s Tale (1990), and Sleuth (2007).
Pinter was also a noted poet, and his
verse—such as that collected in War
(2003)—often reflected his political views
and involvement in numerous causes. In 2007
Pinter was named a chevalier of the French
Legion of Honour.
