Encyclopedia
Harold Pinter, CH,
CBE is a
British playwright, poet, actor, director, and political activist, best known for his plays
The Birthday Party ,
The Caretaker ,
The Homecoming , and
Betrayal , and for his screenplay adaptations of novels by others, such as
The Servant and
The French Lieutenant's Woman .
The recipient of scores of awards and honorary degrees, Pinter received the
Nobel Prize in Literature from the
Swedish Academy in December 2005. In its citation, the Academy states that "Harold Pinter is generally regarded as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century."
Biography
Pinter was born in
Hackney in
London to working class, native
English-
Jewish parents of
Eastern-European ancestry. Correcting general knowledge about Pinter's family background, Michael Billington, Pinter's authorized biographer, documents that "three of Pinter's grandparents hail from
Poland and one from
Odessa, making them
Ashkenazic rather than Sephardic Jews." Pinter was educated at Hackney Downs Grammar School. A "profound influence" on him was his evacuation to
Cornwall and
Reading from
London during 1940 and 1941 before and during
The Blitz and facing "the life-and-death intensity of daily experience." He frequently wrote and published
poetry as a teenager . He played Romeo and Macbeth in 1947 and 1948, while still a student at Hackney Downs Grammar School in productions directed by his English tutor, mentor, and friend Joseph Brearley .
Beginning in autumn 1948, for two semesters, he attended the
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art . Later that year, he was "called up for National Service," registered as a
conscientious objector, was brought to trial twice, and ultimately fined by the magistrate for refusing to serve. He "loath[ed]" RADA, mostly cut classes, and dropped out in 1949. He had a minor role in
Dick Whittington and His Cat at the Chesterfield Hippodrome in 1949-50. From January to July 1951, he attended "two terms" at the Central School of Speech and Drama. From 1951-52, he toured Ireland with the Anew McMaster repertory company, playing over a dozen roles; in 1952 he began regional repertory acting jobs in England; and from 1953-54, he worked for the Donald Wolfit Company, King's Theatre, Hammersmith, performing nearly ten roles. From 1954 until 1959, Harold Pinter acted under the stage name
David Baron. According to Billington, Pinter worked as an actor for "about nine years," primarily in regional repertory companies, performing nearly twenty-five roles. During that period, he also performed occasional roles in his own and others' works , as he has done increasingly more recently.
From 1956 until 1980, Pinter was married to
Vivien Merchant, a rep actress whom he met on tour, probably best known for her performance in the original film
Alfie . Their son, Daniel, was born in 1958. Through the early 70s, Merchant appeared in many of Pinter's works, most notably
The Homecoming on stage and screen . The marriage was rather "turbulent" and began disintegrating in the mid-1960s. For seven years, from 1962-69, Pinter was engaged in a clandestine affair with Joan Bakewell, which informed his play
Betrayal . According to his own program notes for that play, between 1975 and 1980, he lived with historian
Lady Antonia Fraser, wife of
Sir Hugh Fraser. In 1975, Merchant filed for divorce.. The Frasers' divorce became final in 1977 and the Pinters' in 1980. In 1980, Pinter married Antonia Fraser.
Unable to overcome her bitterness and grief at the loss of her husband, Vivien Merchant died of acute alcoholism in 1983. According to Billington, Pinter "did everything possible to support" her until her death and regrets that he became estranged from their son, Daniel, after their separation and Pinter's marriage to Antonia Fraser. Pinter has stated publicly in several recent interviews that he remains "very happy" in his second marriage and enjoys family life, which includes his six adult step-children and over twice as many grandchildren.
Career
Pinter is the author of twenty-nine plays, fifteen dramatic sketches, and over twenty screenplays and filmscripts for cinema and television and co-author of two works for stage and radio. Along with the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play for
The Homecoming and several other American awards and award nominations, he and his plays have received many awards in the UK and elsewhere throughout the world. His screenplays for
The French Lieutenant's Woman and
Betrayal were nominated for
Academy Awards in the category of "Writing: Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium" in 1981 and 1983, respectively.
Pinter's first
play,
The Room, written in 1957, was a student production at the
Bristol University directed by actor
Henry Woolf, who also originated the role of Mr. Kidd in that play . After his longtime friend Pinter had mentioned that he had an "idea" for a play, Woolf asked him to write it so that he could direct it as part of fulfilling requirements for his postgraduate work. Pinter wrote it in three days. To mark and celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of that first production of
The Room, Henry Woolf will again be reprising his role of Mr. Kidd, as well as his role of the Man in Pinter's play
Monologue, as part of an international symposium at the
University of Leeds being planned for April 2007.
The Birthday Party , Pinter's second play and among his best-known, was initially a disaster, despite a rave review in the
Sunday Times by leading theater critic Sir Harold Hobson, which appeared only after the play closed and thus could not save that production. Hobson is generally credited by Pinter himself and other critics as bolstering him and perhaps even rescuing his career After the success of
The Caretaker in 1960, which established Pinter's theatrical reputation,
The Birthday Party was revived both on television and on stage and well received. By the time Peter Hall's production of
The Homecoming reached New York , Harold Pinter had become a celebrity playwright, and the play garnered four Tony awards, among other awards.
In a review published in 1958, borrowing from the subtitle of
A Lunatic View, a play by David Campton, theater critic Irving Wardle also called Pinter's early plays "comedy of menace," a label that people have applied repeatedly to his work, at times pigeonholing and attempting to tame it. Such plays begin with an apparently innocent situation that becomes both threatening and absurd as Pinter's characters behave in ways often perceived as inexplicable by his audiences and one another. Pinter acknowledges the influence of
Samuel Beckett, particularly on his early work; they became friends, sending each other drafts of their works in progress for comments.
From the late sixties through the early eighties, Pinter wrote
Landscape,
Silence, "Night,"
Old Times,
No Man's Land,
Betrayal, and
The Proust Screenplay,
Family Voices, and
A Kind of Alaska , all of which dramatize aspects of
memory and which critics sometimes categorize as Pinter's "memory plays."
Pinter began to direct more frequently during the 1970s, becoming an associate director of the
National Theatre in 1973, and he has directed almost fifty productions of his own and others' plays for stage, film, and television.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, his plays tended to become shorter and overtly political, serving as critiques of oppression,
torture, and other abuses of
human rights. In a 1985 interview called "A Play and Its Politics," with Nicholas Hern, published in the Grove Press edition of
One for the Road, Pinter states that whereas his earlier plays presented "metaphors" about power and powerlessness, the later ones present "realities" of power and its abuse. From 1993 to 1999, reflecting both personal and political concerns, Pinter wrote
Moonlight and
Ashes to Ashes , full-length plays with domestic settings relating to death and dying and to such "atrocities" as the Holocaust; in this period, after the deaths of first his mother and then his father, again merging the personal and the political, Pinter wrote the poems "Death" and "The Disappeared" .
In July and August of 2001, a Harold Pinter Festival celebrating his work was held at
Lincoln Center in
New York City, which he participated in as both a director and an actor .
In October 2001, as part of a weeklong "Harold Pinter Homage" at the World Leaders Festival, in
Toronto, he presented a dramatic reading of
Celebration , following the reception and during the dinner honoring him, and also participated in a public interview. That winter his collaboration with director Di Trevis resulted in their stage adaptation of his as-yet unfilmed 1972 work
The Proust Screenplay being produced at the National Theatre, in London. There was also a revival of
The Caretaker in the
West End.
Late in 2001, Pinter was diagnosed with
cancer of the esophagus, for which, in 2002, he underwent a successful operation and chemotherapy. During the course of his treatment, he directed a production of his play
No Man's Land, wrote and performed in his new sketch "Press Conference" for a two-part otherwise-retrospective program of his dramatic sketches at the National Theatre, and was seen on television in America in the role of Vivian Bearing's father in the HBO film version of
Margaret Edson's
Pulitzer Prize-winning play
Wit. Since then, having become increasingly politically "engaged" as "citizen Pinter," Pinter has continued to write and present politically-charged poetry, dramatic works, essays and speeches.
On 28 February 2005, in an interview with Mark Lawson on the
BBC Radio 4 program
Front Row, Pinter announced that he would retire from writing plays to dedicate himself to his political activism and writing
poetry: "I think I've written 29 plays. I think it's enough for me. I think I've found other forms now. My energies are going in different directions—over the last few years I've made a number of political speeches at various locations and ceremonies . . . I'm using a lot of energy more specifically about political states of affairs, which I think are very, very worrying as things stand." Pinter has reiterated his statement subsequently, but occasionally leaves open the possibility that if a compelling dramatic "image" were to come to mind , perhaps he would still be obliged to pursue it. Indeed, after making this point, at the end of his
Newsnight Review is a British [i] daily news [i] analysis, current affairs [i] and politics [i] ...
interview with
Kirsty Wark, broadcast on June 23, 2006, he and
Rupert Graves performed a dramatic reading of a "new work" by Pinter, a dramatic sketch called "Apart from That," inspired by Pinter's strong adversion to mobile telephones .
Pinter participated in "Meet the Author" with Ramona Koval, at the Edinburgh Book Festival, first public appearance in Britain since he won the Nobel Prize, in
Edinburgh, Scotland, in the evening of 25 August 2006: "Pinter, whose last published play came out in 2000, said the reason he had given up writing was that he had 'written himself out', adding: 'I recently had a holiday in Dorset and took a couple of my usual yellow writing pads. I didn't write a damn word. Fondly, I turned them over and put them in a drawer.'" On 25 September 2006, Ramona Koval began featuring her interview with Pinter on the website of the program
The Book Show, on Radio National , including downloadable audio files and a printable transcript. Prior to the interview, Pinter read a scene from his play
The Birthday Party.
"[D]espite giving up writing [Pinter] will carry on his acting career" ; or, "So keenly is Harold Pinter relishing his return to the stage this autumn that he has put his literary career on the back burner." After returning to London from Edinburgh, in September, Pinter plans to begin rehearsing for his performance of the role of Krapp in
Krapp's Last Tape is a one-act play [i] by Samuel Beckett [i]. ...
, the one-man play by
Samuel Beckett. This production, from 11 October, the day after Pinter's 76th birthday, to 21 October, is part of the fiftieth-anniversary celebration season of the Royal Court Theatre, in
London. Pinter said: "It's a great challenge and I'm going to have a crack at it" . This Royal Court production was sold out by the first day of general ticket sales .
Political activism
Pinter was an early member of the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the
United Kingdom and supported the British Anti-Apartheid Movement , participating in British artists' refusal to permit professional productions of their work in
South Africa in 1963 and in subsequent related campaigns). He has been active in
International PEN, serving as a vice-president, along with
American playwright
Arthur Miller. In 1985, Pinter and Miller traveled to
Turkey, on a mission co-sponsored by International PEN and a Helsinki Watch committee to investigate and protest the torture of imprisoned writers. There he met victims of political oppression and their families. At an American
embassy dinner in
Ankara, held in Miller's honor, at which Pinter was also an invited guest, speaking on behalf of those imprisoned Turkish writers, Pinter confronted the ambassador with "[t]he reality . . . of electric current on your genitals": Pinter's outspokenness apparently angered their host and led to indications of his desired departure. Guest of honor Miller left the embassy with him. Recounting this episode for a tribute to Miller on his 80th birthday, Pinter concludes: "Being thrown out of the US embassy in Ankara with Arthur Miller — a voluntary exile — was one of the proudest moments in my life." Pinter's experiences in Turkey and his knowledge of the Turkish suppression of the
Kurdish language "inspired" his 1988 play
Mountain Language.
He is an active delegate of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign in the
United Kingdom, an organization that defends
Cuba, supports the government of
Fidel Castro, and campaigns against the U.S. embargo on the country.. In 2001 Pinter joined the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Miloševic , which appealed for a fair trial for and the freedom of
Slobodan Miloševic; he signed a related "Artists' Appeal for Miloševic" in 2004.
He strongly opposed the 1991
Gulf War, the 1999
NATO bombing campaign in
Yugoslavia during the
Kosovo War, the 2001
United States war in Afghanistan, and the
2003 Invasion of Iraq. He has been very active in the current anti-war movement in the
United Kingdom, speaking at rallies held by the
Stop the War Coalition. He has called the
President of the United States,
George W. Bush, a "mass murderer" and the
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom,
Tony Blair, both "mass-murdering" and a "deluded idiot"; he alleges that they, along with past U.S. officials, are "
war criminals." He has compared the
Bush administration with
Adolf Hitler's
Nazi Germany, saying that, under Bush, the United States strives to attain "world domination" through "Full spectrum dominance", while, like a "bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain," led by Blair, participates in "an act of premeditated mass murder" instigated on behalf of "the American people", who, Pinter acknowledges, increasingly protest "their government's actions."
He continues to sign petitions on behalf of artistic and political causes that he supports, and became a signatory of the mission statement of Jews For Justice For Palestinians in 2005 and of its full-page advertisement, "What Is Israel Doing? A Call by Jews in Britain" featured in the
London Times is a national newspaper [i] published daily in the United Kingdom [i] since 1785, and unde ...
on 6 July 2006. He also co-signed an open letter about recent events in the Middle East dated 19 July 2006, distributed to major news publications on 21 July 2006, and posted on the website of
Noam Chomsky on 27 July 2006.
He also contributes letters to the editor, essays, speeches, and poetry strongly expressing his artistic and political viewpoints, which are frequently published initially in British
periodicals, both via print and online publishing and, increasingly, distributed and re-distributed extensively over the
Internet and throughout the blogosphere. These have been distributed more widely since his winning the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005; subsequent related news accounts often cite his status as a Nobel Laureate.
For over the past two decades, in his speeches, interviews, and literary readings, Pinter has focused increasingly on political issues. Since the mid-eighties, he has described his earlier plays retrospectively from the perspective of the politics of power and the dynamics of oppression. During his appearance at the Edinburgh Book Festival on 25 August 2006, for example, after reading an interrogation scene from
The Birthday Party, Pinter offered a rare "explanation": Pinter "wanted to say that Goldberg and McCann represented the forces in society who wanted to snuff out dissent, to stifle Stanley's voice, to silence him," and that in 1958, "'One thing [the critics who almost unanimously hated the play] got wrong . . . was the whole history of stifling, suffocating and destroying dissent. Not too long before, the Gestapo had represented order, discipline, family life, obligation — and anyone who disagreed with that was in trouble.'" In both his writing and his public speaking, as McDowell observes,
Pinter's precision of language is immensely political. Twist words like "democracy" and "freedom", as he believes Blair and Bush have done over Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of people die.
Earlier this year [March 2006], when he was presented with the European Theatre Prize in Turin, Pinter said he intended to spend the rest of his life railing against the United States. Surely, asked chair Ramona Koval, he was doomed to fail?
"Oh yes — me against the United States!" he said, laughing along with the audience at the absurdity, before adding: "But I can't stop reacting to what is done in our name, and what is being done in the name of freedom and democracy is disgusting."
Honors
Pinter was appointed
CBE in 1966 and became a Companion of Honour in 2002 . He has also received the 1995 David Cohen British Literature Prize, in recognition of a lifetime's achievement in literature, the 1996 Laurence Olivier Special Award for a lifetime's achievement in the theater; a 2001 World Leaders Award for "creative genius"; the 2004
Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry—"in recognition of Pinter's lifelong contribution to literature, 'and specifically for his collection of poetry entitled
War, published in 2003,'" and the Europe Theatre Prize, in recognition of lifetime achievements pertaining to drama and theater .
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2005
On 13 October 2005 the
Swedish Academy announced that it had decided to award the
Nobel Prize in Literature for 2005 to "
Harold Pinter," "
who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms." Nobel Week, including the
Nobel Prize Awards Ceremony in
Stockholm and related events throughout
Scandinavia, occurred early in December 2005.
Due to concerns about his health, Pinter and his family could not attend the Awards Ceremony and related events of Nobel Week. After the Academy notified him of his award, he had arranged for his publisher to accept his Nobel Diploma and Nobel Medal at the Awards Ceremony scheduled for 10 December, but he had still planned to travel to
Stockholm, to present his lecture in person a few days earlier. In November, however, he was hospitalized for a rare mouth infection, and his doctor barred such travel. While still hospitalized, Pinter went to a
Channel Four studio to videotape his Nobel Lecture: "Art, Truth & Politics," which was projected on three large screens at the
Swedish Academy on 7 December 2005. The video was simultaneously broadcast, introduced by friend and fellow playwright David Hare, that evening on
Channel Four in the
UK as well. Subsequently, the full text and streaming video formats were posted for the public on the Nobel Prize and Swedish Academy official websites.
Art, Truth & Politics: The Nobel Lecture
In his controversial Nobel Lecture "Art, Truth & Politics," speaking with obvious difficulty while seated in a wheelchair, Pinter distinguishes between the search for
truth in
art and the avoidance of truth in politics. He asserts:
Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory [of the artist] since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.
As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al-Qaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.
The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.
Charging the
United States with having "supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the
Second World War," leading to "hundreds of thousands of deaths," Pinter asks: "Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy?" Then he answers his own question: "The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it."
Revisiting arguments from his
political essays and speeches of the past decade, Pinter reiterates:
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'
In imagery recalling his description of "speech" as "a constant stratagem to cover nakedness," Pinter adds:
It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.
Toward the end of the lecture, after reading two poems referring to "blood in the streets," "deaths," "dead bodies," and "death" by fellow Nobel Laureate
Pablo Neruda and himself, in a whimsically-humble gesture, Pinter offers to "volunteer" for the "job" of "speech writer" for President
George W. Bush, penning a ruthless message of fierce
aggression masquerading as moral struggle of
good versus evil yet finally proferring the "authority" of his "fist". Pinter demands prosecution of
Tony Blair in the
International Criminal Court, while pointing out, with irony, that he would do the same for
George W. Bush if Bush had not so shrewedly refused to "ratify" that Court. Pinter concludes his Nobel Lecture with a call for "unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies" as "a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all," one which he regards as "in fact mandatory," for, he warns, "If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us — the dignity of man."
Miscellaneous
- Chairman of the , Pinter has called cricket one of his three great "loves." The other "two" are "love" and "writing" . "Running" and "reading" are two other pleasures that he mentions at times in interviews.
- Pinter is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.
- On the day his Nobel Prize was announced, 13 October 2005, the Sky News reader saw his name and erroneously reported him dead. It was widely known that he had been battling esophageal cancer since 2002 and that he had fallen and injured his head in Dublin, upon returning from the Gate Theatre festival celebrating his 75th birthday that previous weekend; that knowledge may have led to her mistaken assumption. When interviewed about his reaction to the Nobel Prize announcement by Billington, Pinter joked: "I was told today that one of the Sky channels said this morning that 'Harold Pinter is dead[.'] Then they changed their mind and said, 'No, he's won the Nobel prize.' So I've risen from the dead."
- "That [Harold Pinter] 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'" , placing him in the company of authors considered unique or influential enough to elicit eponymous adjectives. Susan Harris Smith observes: "The term 'Pinteresque' has had an established place in the English language for almost thirty years. The OED is a dictionary [i] published by the Oxford University Press [i] , an ...
defines it as 'of or relating to the British playwright, Harold Pinter, or his works[';] thus, like a snake swallowing its own tail the definition forms the impenetrable logic of a closed circle and begs the tricky question of what the word specifically means" . The Online OED is a dictionary [i] published by the Oxford University Press [i] , an ...
defines Pinteresque more explicitly: "Resembling or characteristic of his plays. . . . Pinter's plays are typically characterized by implications of threat and strong feeling produced through colloquial language, apparent triviality, and long pauses." The Swedish Academy defines characteristics of the Pinteresque in greater detail: 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.
Over the years Pinter himself has "always been very dismissive when people have talked about languages and silences and situations as being 'Pinteresque,'" observes Kirsty Wark in their interview on Newsnight is a British [i] daily news [i] analysis, current affairs [i] and politics [i] ...
Review broadcast on 23 June 2006; she wonders, "Will you finally acknowledge there is such a thing as a 'Pinteresque' moment?" "No," Pinter replies, "I've no idea what it means. Never have. I really don't. . . . I can detect where a thing is 'Kafkaesque' or 'Chekhovian' [Wark's examples]," but with respect to the "Pinteresque," he says, "I can't define what it is myself. You use the term 'menace' and so on. I have no explanation of any of that really. What I write is what I write.
- Once asked what his plays are about, Pinter lobbed back a phrase "the weasel under the cocktail cabinet", which he regrets has been taken seriously and applied in popular criticism. Like one of the "two silences" that he defined in his 1962 speech to the National Student Drama Festival in Bristol, such a time when "too many words are spoken" may be "irrevocable"; it cannot be "taken back":
Once many years ago, I found myself engaged uneasily in a public discussion on theatre. Someone asked me what was my work 'about'. I replied with no thought at all and merely to frustrate this line of enquiry: 'the weasel under the cocktail cabinet'. This was a great mistake. Over the years I have seen that remark quoted in a number of learned columns. It has now seemingly acquired a profound significance, and is seen to be a highly relevant and meaningful observation about my own work. But for me the remark meant precisely nothing.
Despite Pinter's protestations to the contrary, many reviewers and other critics still find that Pinter's "remark," though "facetious," is still an apt description of his plays.
- A witty homage to Pinter's play Betrayal occurs in an episode of Seinfeld is an American [i] television [i] situation comedy [i] set in New York City [i] ...
entitled ""The Betrayal." Structured in reverse somewhat like the play, the episode features a character named "Pinter." Coincidentally, Pinter's play features a character named "Jerry," the first name of co-creator Jerry Seinfeld and the main character of Seinfeld is an American [i] television [i] situation comedy [i] set in New York City [i] ...
based on himself.
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...
, "Tamara's Return" , alludes to Pinter in dialogue between lead character Pacey Witter and Tamara Jacobs , his former English teacher with whom Pacey has had an affair. Tamara tells Pacey that an awkward moment of silence between them is "what we ex-English teachers call a classic 'Pinter' moment, where everything is said in silence because the emotion behind what we really want to say is just too overwhelming. . . . [S]ilence is an acquired taste. The more complicated life becomes the better it is to learn to say nothing." When Pacey inquires "Who is this Pinter guy?" Tamara urges him, "Stay in school." Later Pacey tells Tamara that he has "looked up this Pinter guy. Harold, playwright, the king of subtext. You say one thing, but you mean another," wondering further: "Do you think it's possible for us to have a moment without all the subtext?" "Uh, I don't know, Pacey," Tamara replies. "Words have always gotten us into so much trouble." Pacey and Tamara finally agree that "This Pinter guy was really onto something." Ironically, one of those words which has "gotten" Pinter critics "into so much trouble" is that very word
subtext.
Works
Stage and television plays
- The Room
- The Birthday Party
- The Dumb Waiter
- A Slight Ache
- The Hothouse
- The Caretaker
- A Night Out
- Night School, published in 1976, was the first short-story collection by Americ...
- The Dwarfs
- The Collection
- The Lover is an autobiographical novel [i] by Marguerite Duras [i], published in 1984 by Les ditions de Minuit [i] ...
- Tea Party
- The Homecoming
- The Basement
- Landscape
- Silence
- Old Times
- Monologue
- No Man's Land
- Betrayal
- Family Voices
- A Kind of Alaska
- Victoria Station
- One for the Road
- Mountain Language
- Party Time
- Moonlight
- Ashes to Ashes
- Celebration
- Remembrance of Things Past [Stage adapt. of The Proust Screenplay; a collaboration with Di Trevis.]
Dramatic sketches
- "The Black and White"
- "Trouble in the Works"
- "Last to Go"
- "Request Stop"
- "Special Offer"
- "That's Your Trouble"
- "That's All"
- "Interview"
- "Applicant"
- "Dialogue for Three"
- "Night"
- "Precisely"
- "The New World Order"
- "Press Conference"
- "Apart from That"
Radio plays
Screenplays for films
- The Caretaker
- The Servant
- The Pumpkin Eater
- The Compartment [Screenplay for unproduced film; adapt. for stage as The Basement]]]
- The Quiller Memorandum
- Accident
- The Birthday Party
- The Go-Between
- The Homecoming
- Langrishe, Go Down *The Proust Screenplay [Published but unproduced for film; rev. & adapt. for stage ; cf. Remembrance of Things Past.]
- The Last Tycoon
- The French Lieutenant's Woman
- Betrayal
- Victory [Published but unproduced]
- Turtle Diary
- The Handmaid's Tale
- Reunion
- The Heat of the Day [adapt. for TV]
- The Comfort of Strangers
- Party Time
- The Trial
- Lolita [Unpublished and unproduced; cf. Lolita is a novel [i] by Vladimir Nabokov [i], first published in 1955 [i]. ...
] - The Dreaming Child [Published but unproduced]
- The Tragedy of King Lear [Unpublished and unproduced]
Prose fiction
- "Kullus"
- The Dwarfs
- "Latest Reports from the Stock Exchange"
- "The Black and White"
- "The Examination"
- "Tea Party"
- "The Coast"
- "Problem"
- "Lola"
- "Short Story"
- "Girls"
- "God's District" [Unpublished]
- "Sorry About This"
- "Tess"
- "Voices in the Tunnel"
Collected poetry
- Poems
- I Know the Place
- Poems and Prose 1949-1977
- Ten Early Poems
- Collected Poems and Prose
- "The Disappeared" and Other Poems
- War
Anthologies and other collections
- 99 Poems in Translation: An Anthology Selected by Harold Pinter, Anthony Astbury, & Geoffrey Godbert
- 100 Poems by 100 Poets: An Anthology Selected by Harold Pinter, Anthony Astbury, & Geoffrey Godbert
- 101 Poems Against War . Eds. Matthew Hollis & Paul Kegan. Afterword Andrew Motion.
- The Essential Pinter
- Poems by Harold Pinter Chosen by Antonia Fraser. [Ltd ed. of 300 copies, "of which the first fifty are numbered and signed by the selector."]
- Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948-2005
- Death etc.
Notes
References
- Batty, Mark. About Pinter: The Playwright and The Work. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. ISBN 0571220053.
- Bensky, Lawrence M. The Paris Review 39 . 30 June 2006.
- Billington, Michael. The Life and Work of Harold Pinter. 1996; rpt. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. ISBN 0571171036.
- –––. : Shades of Beckett As Ailing Playwright Delivers Powerful Nobel Lecture." The Guardian 8 Dec. 2005. 31 July 2006.
- –––, comp. The Guardian 14 Oct. 2005. 31 July 2006.
- Nobel Foundation and Swedish Academy. NobelPrize.org. Oct. 2005. 31 July 2006.
- Bond, Paul. World Socialist Web Site 29 Dec. 2005. 31 July 2006.
- Brown, Mark. Socialist Review Sept. 2003. 31 July 2006.
- BBC News 7 Dec. 2005. 31 July 2006. [Features related links.]
- Chrisafis, Angelique, and Imogen Tilden. The Guardian 11 June 2003.
- Eden, Richard, and Tim Walker. Sunday Telegraph 27 Aug. 2006, accessed 31 Aug. 2006.
- Gussow, Mel. Conversations with Pinter. London: Nick Hern Books, 1994. ISBN 1854592017. Rpt. New York: Limelight, 2004. ISBN 0879101792.
- Higgins, Charlotte. The Guardian 26 Aug. 2006. Accessed 26 Aug. 2006.
- Hitchens, Christopher. "Commentary: The Sinister Mediocrity of Harold Pinter." Wall Street Journal 17 Oct. 2005, A18. . Znet 18 Oct. 2005. 4 July 2006.
- Howard, Jennifer. Chronicle of Higher Education is a newspaper [i] that is a source of news, information, and jobs ...
13 Oct. 2006. 8 July 2006. - Koval, Ramona. Radio National Australian Broadcasting Corporation 15 Sept. 2002. Transcript of interview of Harold Pinter conducted at Edinburgh Book Festival, Edinburgh, Scotland, Aug. 2002.
- –––. 's national public broadcaster [i] ...
, 25 Sept. 2006. Downloadable audio file and printable transcript of interview of Harold Pinter conducted at Edinburgh International Book Festival ,"] Edinburgh, Scotland, 25 Aug. 2006, The Book Show, Radio National , 25 Sept. 2006, accessed 26 Sept. - Lyall, Sarah. New York Times is a newspaper [i] published in New York City [i] by Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. [i] ...
8 Dec. 2006. Correction appended 10 Dec. 2005. 1 Aug. 2006. - [McDowell, Leslie.] "Book Festival Reviews: The Scotsman 26 Aug. 2006: 5. 31 Aug. 2006.
- Merritt, Susan Hollis. Pinter in Play: Critical Strategies and the Plays of Harold Pinter. Paperback ed. 1990; Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995. ISBN 0822316749.
- –––. "Talking about Pinter." Collected Essays 2001 and 2002. Ed. Francis Gillen and Steven H. Gale. Tampa: U of Tampa P, 2002. 144-67.
- –––, comp. 1987- .
- Moss, Stephen. The Guardian is a British [i] newspaper [i] owned by the Guardian Media Group [i]. ...
4 Sept. 1999. 7 July 2006. - Pilger, John. ZNet 16 Oct. 2005. 5 July 2006.
- Pinter, Harold. . Presented on video in Stockholm, Sweden. 7 Dec. 2005. Nobel Foundation and Swedish Academy
