Harold Pinter

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Harold Pinter

Delivering his Nobel Lecture on video (December 7, 2005)
Copyright © 2006, Illuminations
Born: October 10, 1930 (age 76)
Hackney, London, England, United Kingdom
Occupation: playwright, screenwriter, poet, actor, director, author, political activist
Writing period: 1957-
Genres: Modernism, Theatre of the Absurd, Post-Modernism
Influences: Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett
Influenced: David Mamet, Patrick Marber, Martin McDonagh
Website: HaroldPinter.Org

Harold Pinter, CH, CBE (born 10 October 1930) is a British playwright, screenwriter, poet, actor, director, author, and political activist, best known for his plays The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1959), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), and also for his screenplay adaptations of novels by others, such as The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1980), and The Trial (1993).

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."[1]

Contents

[edit] 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."[2] 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."[3] He frequently wrote and published poetry as a teenager (and has continued to do so throughout his career). 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 (Billington, Life and Work 13-14).

[edit] Early theatrical training and stage experience

Beginning in autumn 1948, for two semesters, he attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). 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.[4] According to Billington, Pinter worked as an actor for "about nine years," primarily in regional repertory companies, performing nearly twenty-five roles.[5] During that period, he also performed occasional roles in his own and others' works (for radio, TV, and film), as he has done increasingly more recently.[6]

[edit] Personal life

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 (1966). 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 (1965) and screen (1973). The marriage was 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 (1978). 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.[7] 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 remarriage.[8] Pinter 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, and considers himself "a very lucky man in every respect."[9]

Chairman of the Gaieties Cricket Club, Pinter has called cricket one of his three great "loves." The other two are "love" (of women) and "writing" (Gussow, Conversations with Pinter 28-29). "Running" (as a teenage sprinter [29]) and "reading" are two other pleasures that he mentions at times in interviews. Pinter is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.

[edit] Main career (1957- )

Pinter is the author of twenty-nine plays, fifteen dramatic sketches, over twenty-one screenplays and filmscripts for cinema and television, a novel, and other prose fiction and essays, 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. (See Honors.)

Pinter's first play, The Room, written in 1957, was a student production at the Bristol University directed by (later acclaimed) actor Henry Woolf, who also originated the role of Mr. Kidd in that play (which he reprised in 2001). 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.[10] 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.[11]

The Birthday Party (1957), 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 (the late) Sir Harold Hobson, which appeared only after the play closed and thus could not save that production.[12] Hobson is generally credited by Pinter himself and other critics as bolstering him and perhaps even rescuing his career[13] After the success of The Caretaker in 1960, which established Pinter's theatrical reputation, The Birthday Party was revived both on television (with Pinter himself in the role of Goldberg) and on stage and well received. By the time Peter Hall's production of The Homecoming (1964) reached New York (1967), Harold Pinter had become a celebrity playwright, and the play garnered four Tony awards, among other awards.[14]

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. (Cf. Comedy of manners.)[15] 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. (Cf. Theatre of the Absurd.) 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.[16]

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 (1993) and Ashes to Ashes (1996), full-length plays with domestic settings relating to death and dying and (in the latter case) 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" (1997) (which he read in his 2005 Nobel Lecture) and "The Disappeared" (1998).

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 (of a double bill pairing his newest play Celebration with his first play The Room) and an actor (as Nicolas in One for the Road).

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 (2000), following the reception and during the dinner honoring him, and also participated in a public interview.[17] That winter his collaboration with director Di Trevis resulted in their stage adaptation of his as-yet unfilmed 1972 work The Proust Screenplay (Remembrance of Things Past) being produced at the National Theatre, in London.[18] 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."[19] Pinter has reiterated his statement subsequently, but occasionally leaves open the possibility that if a compelling dramatic "image" were to come to mind (which he states as "not likely"), perhaps he would still be obliged to pursue it. Indeed, after making this point, at the end of his Newsnight Review 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 (He made clear that he doesn't own one).[20]

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. Prior to the interview, Pinter read a scene from his play The Birthday Party.[21] According to one press account, "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.'"[22] From Robinson's perspective, "[D]espite giving up writing [Pinter] will carry on his acting career" (Robinson, "I'm Written Out"). From another perspective, as two other journalists observe: "So keenly is Harold Pinter relishing his return to the stage this autumn that he has put his literary career on the back burner."[23]

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, 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.[24] Pinter said: "It's a great challenge and I'm going to have a crack at it" (qtd. by Robinson, "I'm Written Out"). This Royal Court production was sold out by the first day of general ticket sales (4 September 2006).

On 18 August 2006, Sheffield Theatres announced Pinter: A Celebration, to take place for a month from 11 October through 11 November 2006. The program features selected productions of Pinter's plays (in order of presentation): The Caretaker, Voices, No Man's Land, Family Voices, Tea Party, The Room, One for the Road and The Dumb Waiter; films (most his screenplays; some in which Pinter appears as an actor): The Go-Between, Accident, The Birthday Party, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Reunion, Mojo, The Servant, The Pumpkin Eater; and other related program events: "Pause for Thought" (Penelope Wilton and Douglas Hodge in conversation with Michael Billington), "Ashes to Ashes –– A Cricketing Celebration", a "Pinter Quiz Night", "The New World Order", the BBC2 documentary film Arena: Harold Pinter (introd. Anthony Wall, producer of Arena), and "The New World Order –– A Pause for Peace" (a consideration of "Pinter's pacifist writing" [both poems and prose] supported by the Sheffield Quakers), and a screening of "Pinter's passionate and antagonistic 45-minute Nobel Prize Lecture."[25]

A Broadway revival of The Homecoming, starring Ian McShane and directed by Daniel Sullivan, is "scheduled to begin rehearsals in October 2007."[26] Other "upcoming events" (updated periodically) are listed on the home page of Pinter's official website.

[edit] Political activism

Pinter was an early member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the United Kingdom and supported the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (1959-94), participating in British artists' refusal to permit professional productions of their work in South Africa in 1963 and in subsequent related campaigns).[27] 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 (in Pinter's words) "[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."[28] Pinter's experiences in Turkey and his knowledge of the Turkish suppression of the Kurdish language "inspired" his 1988 play Mountain Language.[29]

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.[30] In 2001 Pinter joined the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević (ICDSM), which appealed for a fair trial for and the freedom of Slobodan Milošević; he signed a related "Artists' Appeal for Milošević" in 2004. (The organization continues its presence on the internet even after Milošević's death in 2006.)

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 ("a bunch of criminal lunatics") with Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, saying that, under Bush, the United States ("a monster out of control") 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."[31]

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 on 6 July 2006.[32] 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.[33]

On February 5, 2007, the London Independent reports, along with historian Eric Hobsbawm, human rights lawyer Geoffrey Bindman, fashion designer Nicole Farhi, film director Mike Leigh, and actors Stephen Fry and Zoë Wanamaker, among others, Harold Pinter launched the organization Independent Jewish Voices in the United Kingdom "to represent British Jews...in response to a perceived pro-Israeli bias in existing Jewish bodies in the UK",, and, according to Hobsbawn, "as a counter-balance to the uncritical support for Israeli policies by established bodies such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews."[34]

See main article: Independent Jewish Voices#Declaration

Pinter 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.'"[35] 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." (Qtd. by McDowell)

[edit] Honors

Pinter was appointed CBE in 1966 and became a Companion of Honour in 2002 (having previously declined a knighthood in 1996). 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 (conferred March 2006).[36] On January 18, 2007, BBC News announced that French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin presented Harold Pinter with one of his country's highest awards, the Légion d'honneur . . . at a ceremony at the French embassy in London, shortly after holding talks with Tony Blair," and that Prime Minister de Villepin "praised Mr Pinter's poem American Football [1991],"

Further information: #Poems_by_Harold_Pinter

saying: "With its violence and its cruelty, it is for me one of the most accurate images of war, one of the most telling metaphors of the temptation of imperialism and violence"; "in return," Pinter "praised France for its oppposition to the war in Iraq." In reporting this honor, "The BBC's Lawrence Pollard says the award for the great playwright underlines how much Mr Pinter is admired in countries like France as a model of the uncompromising radical intellectual."[37][38]

[edit] 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."[39]

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."[40]

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 (Stephen Page of Faber and Faber) 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.[41] 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.[42] 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.[43]

© Illuminations
© Illuminations

[edit] 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.[44] 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,"

Further information: #Pinter's "two silences": a "continual evasion" of "communication"

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 (Bush's) "fist". (The 23 June 2006 Newsnight program featuring Wark's interview of Pinter presents a video clip of his subsequent reading of "Bush's speech" before a later audience in London.) 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."[45]

[edit] Pinter and Academia

Among his other honors, Pinter is the recipient of over fifteen honorary degrees conferred by European and American academic institutions, as well as an Honorary Fellow of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) (1970).[46]

Further information: #Artist and Citizen: 50 Years of Performing Pinter

In 2006 Pinter was elected a "foreign member" of the Department of Language and Literature of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.[47]

[edit] The Harold Pinter Society

In 1986, a group of American academic scholars formed the Harold Pinter Society, now an Allied Organization of the MLA, which provides its members and individual and institutional subscribers a journal (now a biennial book publication) called The Pinter Review: Collected Essays, published by the University of Tampa Press since 1987.

Further information: #Other external links.

[edit] Artist and Citizen: 50 Years of Performing Pinter

Workshop Theatre, School of English, University of Leeds is hosting a conference, entitled "Artist and Citizen: 50 Years of Performing Pinter", to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first production of Harold Pinter's first play, The Room, scheduled to take place from April 12 to April 15, 2007. Guests are to include Harold Pinter and Henry Woolf, who will reprise his original role as Mr. Kidd in a revival of that play and also his performance as the Man in Monologue. During the April 2007 conference, Pinter will also receive the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Leeds School of English.[48]

[edit] The Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing

Goldsmiths College, University of London, established the Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing, inaugurated in June 2003, with Harold Pinter as Honorary President. It is "an interdisciplinary research centre, involving principally the Departments of English & Comparative Literature and of Drama, the latter organising and hosting the Centre, and with links in Media and Communications, Music, PACE and the Digital Studios." So far it has planned three conferences, "one on the work of Stephen Sondheim, and another on African Women Playwrights." Its third conference, Ravenhill 10, was a symposium on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the first production of Mark Ravenhill's play Shopping and Fucking (11-12 Nov. 2006). The Pinter Centre will sponsor additional conferences in the future, "including one on Black British Drama and a major conference in 2008 to be entitled, 'Pinter, Postmodernism and Contemporary Writing'."[49]

[edit] Characteristics of Pinter's work

[edit] "Pinteresque"

"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'" ("Bio-bibliography"), 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 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" (103). The Online OED (2006) 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."[50] 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. ("Bio-bibliography")

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 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."[51]

[edit] "The weasel under the cocktail cabinet"

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:

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.[52]

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.[53]

[edit] "Two silences": a "continual evasion" of "communication"

Among the most-commonly cited of Pinter's comments on his own work are his remarks about two kinds of silence ("two silences"), including his objections to "that tired, grimy phrase 'failure of communication'," as defined in his speech to the National Student Drama Festival in Bristol in 1962, incorporated in his published version of the speech entitled "Writing for the Theatre":

There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it. That is its continual reference. The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its place. When true silence falls we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase: 'failure of communication'...and this phrase has been fixed to my work quite consistently. I believe the contrary. I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communicaton is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.
I am not suggesting that no character in a play can never say what he in fact means. Not at all. I have found that there invariably does come a moment when this happens, when he says something, perhaps, which he has never said before. And where this happens, what he says is irrevocable, and can never be taken back.[54]

[edit] Some literary allusions to Pinter and his work in American popular culture

A line in "The Ladies Who Lunch", a song in Company, the 1970 Broadway musical by George Furth and Stephen Sondheim, alludes to "a Pinter play".[55]

A witty homage to Pinter's play Betrayal occurs in episode 164 of Seinfeld entitled "The Betrayal", which first aired as the 8th episode for the 9th and final season on November 20, 1997. 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 based on himself.

The fourth episode of the second season of Dawson's Creek, "Tamara's Return" (28 Oct. 1998), alludes to Pinter in dialogue between lead character Pacey Witter (played by Joshua Jackson) and Tamara Jacobs (Leann Hunley), 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.[56]

[edit] Works

See main article: Works of Harold Pinter

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ See the Swedish Academy's Announcement (incl. links to video of official Nobel "Announcement", "Interview", and "Press Release"). See also the "Special Report" posted in The Guardian Online, including "'The foremost representative of British drama': Excerpts From the Swedish Academy's Citation Awarding the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature to British Playwright Harold Pinter" (13 October 2006). "Bio-bibliography" for Harold Pinter posted online on the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation websites incorporates the full version of Pinter's Nobel citation.
  2. ^ Billington, Life and Work 1-5.
  3. ^ Billington, Life and Work 5-10; cf. Harold Pinter, "Evacuees", an interview conducted in 1968 by B.S. Johnson, first published in The Pinter Review: Annual Essays 1994: 8-13.
  4. ^ Pinter's paternal "grandmother's maiden name was Baron . . . he adopted it as his stage-name . . . [and] used it [Baron] for the autobiographical character of Mark in the first draft of [his novel] The Dwarfs" (Billington, Life and Work 3).
  5. ^ In an Oct. 1989 interview with Mel Gussow, Pinter says, "I was in English rep as an actor for about 12 years. My favourite roles were undoubtedly the sinister ones. They're something to get your teeth into" (83).
  6. ^ Billington, Life and Work 20-25; 31, 36, 38; Batty, "Chronology" in About Pinter; Batty, comp., "Acting" & "Directing" at HaroldPinter.org.
  7. ^ "People," online posting, Time Archive: 1923 to the Present 11 Aug. 1975 (7 July 2006).
  8. ^ A reclusive gifted writer and musician, Daniel does not use the surname Pinter, adopting instead his maternal grandmother's maiden name, Brand, after his parents separated (Life and Work 276, 255).
  9. ^ See, e.g., Billington, Life and Work and "'They said...'", Moss, and Wark.
  10. ^ Woolf, as qtd. in Merritt, "Talking about Pinter" 147.
  11. ^ See the program announcement of Artist and Citizen: Fifty Years of Performing Pinter posted on the website of the Harold Pinter Society.
  12. ^ See Harold Hobson, "The Screw Turns Again", originally published in the London Sunday Times 25 May 1958: 11; cf. Merritt, "Sir Harold Hobson: The Promptings of Personal Experience", in Pinter in Play 221-25. The entire review is accessible in the sec. on The Birthday Party (premiere) at HaroldPinter.org, including the following often-quoted passage:

    One of the actors in Harold Pinter[']s The Birthday Party at the Lyric, Hammersmith, announces in the programme that he read History at Oxford, and took his degree with Fourth Class Honours. Now I am well aware that Mr Pinter[']s play received extremely bad notices last Tuesday morning. At the moment I write these it is uncertain even whether the play will still be in the bill by the time they appear, though it is probable it will soon be seen elsewhere. Deliberately, I am willing to risk whatever reputation I have as a judge of plays by saying that The Birthday Party is not a Fourth, not even a Second, but a First; and that Pinter, on the evidence of his work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London. . . . Mr Pinter and The Birthday Party, despite their experiences last week, will be heard of again. Make a note of their names.

  13. ^ Billington, Life and Work 85; e.g., in their Sept. 1993 interview, Pinter told Mel Gussow: "I felt pretty discouraged before Hobson. He had a tremendous influence on my life" (141).
  14. ^ Harold Pinter at the Internet Broadway Database
  15. ^ Merritt, Pinter in Play 225-26.
  16. ^ Harold Pinter on Newsnight Review.
  17. ^ Press release International Festival of Authors, Toronto.
  18. ^ Archived production details National Theatre, London, Feb. 2001.
  19. ^ See Lawson, "Pinter to 'give up writing plays.'"
  20. ^ See Wark, "Harold Pinter on Newsnight Review".
  21. ^ On 25 September 2006, Ramona Koval began featuring her interview with Pinter on the website of the program The Book Show, on Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), including downloadable audio files (MP3) and a printable transcript. See Ramona Koval, "Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize-Winning Playwright and Poet, at Edinburgh International Book Festival (transcript available)", Edinburgh, Scotland, 25 Aug. 2006, The Book Show, Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), 25 Sept. 2006, accessed 26 Sept. 2006.
  22. ^ Qtd. by David Robinson, "I'm Written Out, Says Controversial Pinter", The Scotsman 26 Aug. 2006: 6, accessed 31 Aug. 2006.
  23. ^ Richard Eden and Tim Walker, "Mandrake: A Pinteresque Silence", Sunday Telegraph 27 Aug. 2006, accessed 31 Aug. 2006.
  24. ^ See Edinburgh Book Festival and the production announcement for Krapp's Last Tape, as well as "Upcoming events for the year 2006" on the home page of HaroldPinter.org.
  25. ^ See "Latest News: August 2006: Sheffield Theatres Presents Pinter: A Celebration", sheffieldtheatres.co.uk 18 August 2006, accessed 28 September 2006.
  26. ^ Andrew Gans, "Ian McShane to Have Broadway Homecoming", Playbill 14 November 2006, accessed 14 November 2006.
  27. ^ See E. S. Reddy, "Free Mandela: An Account of the Campaign to Free Nelson Mandela and All Other Political Prisoners in South Africa", July 1988, online posting, African National Congress (ANC): Documents: History of Campaigns.
  28. ^ Qtd. from "Arthur Miller's Socks", posted in "Campaigning Against Torture" at HaroldPinter.org and rpt. in Various Voices.
  29. ^ Billington, Life and Work 309-10; Gussow, Conversations with Pinter 67-68.
  30. ^ See the Cuba Solidarity Campaign website Hands Off Cuba!
  31. ^ Pinter, in a public reading from War, as qtd. by Chrisafis and Tilden, "Pinter blasts 'Nazi America' and 'deluded idiot' Blair"; cf. Pinter's remarks to the mass peace protest demonstration held on 15 February 2003 in London, published as "Speech at Hyde Park": "The United States is a monster out of control. Unless we challenge it with absolute determination American barbarism will destroy the world. The country is run by a bunch of criminal lunatics, with Blair as their hired Christian thug. The planned attack on Iraq is an act of premeditated mass murder"; and Pinter's 2005 Nobel Lecture, "Art, Truth & Politics": "Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force - yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish." Cf. Not in Our Name and Not in my name, also a slogan used by the UK Stop the War Coalition, in whose anti-war protests and rallies Pinter has participated.
  32. ^ See "About Jews For Justice For Palestinians", featuring its mission statement and links to a pdf file of the ad.
  33. ^ See "What's New",Chomsky.info and "Letter from Pinter, Saramago, Chomsky and Berger"; both accessed 25 July 2006. The letter was signed first by John Berger, Noam Chomsky, Harold Pinter, and José Saramago and "later endorsed" by Tariq Ali, et al. Cf. "Palestinian Nation under Threat",The Independent 21 July 2006, accessed 26 Aug. 2006. See also Chomsky, "Comments on Dershowitz", ZNet 6 Sept. 2006, accessed 7 Sept. 2006, preceding the quoted text of a reply to the letter by Alan Dershowitz.
  34. ^ Martin Hodgson,"British Jews Break Away from 'pro-Israeli' Board of Deputies", The Independent February 5, 2007, accessed February 6, 2007.
  35. ^ Qtd. by Lesley McDowell, "Book Festival Reviews: Pinter at 75: The Anger Still Burns: Harold Pinter", The Scotsman 26 August 2006: 5 (updated 27 August 2006), accessed 31 August 2006.
  36. ^ Wilfred Owen Association Newsletter 4 Aug. 2004; and the Europe Theatre Prize--X Ed. (8-12 Mar. 2006); see espec. "Letter of Motivation".
  37. ^ "French PM Honours Harold Pinter", BBC News 18 January 2007, accessed 18 January 2007.
  38. ^ N.B.: More fully-complete lists of Pinter's many other awards, including several honorary degrees from universities around the world, appear in the section on Pinter's "Biography" posted online at his official website HaroldPinter.org and in published chronologies of his career. See also his Nobel Prize Bio-bibliography, notably: Baker and Ross; Gordon (ed.), Pinter at 70; Merritt (comp.), "Harold Pinter Bibliography"; and webpages of The Harold Pinter Society. Updates are generally listed on HaroldPinter.org.
  39. ^ Qtd. in press release, 13 Oct. 2005, online posting, Nobel Prize official website. The press release accompanied its recorded press conference. (Audio and video streaming media files of the press conference and related interviews are accessible on the official websites of the Nobel Prize and the Swedish Academy.)
  40. ^ Qtd. in Billington, comp., "'They've said you've a call from the Nobel Committee. I said, Why?'"
  41. ^ See "Publisher to stand in for Pinter at Nobel ceremony".
  42. ^ See Lyall, "Playwright Takes a Prize and a Jab at U.S."
  43. ^ These formats of Pinter's Nobel Lecture have been widely cited, quoted, and distributed by print and online media and the source of much commentary and debate. For selected commentary about and later published versions of "Art, Truth & Politics", see References.
  44. ^ "Art, Truth, & Politics:"The Nobel Lecture".
  45. ^ Online posting of the full text of Pinter's Nobel Lecture.
  46. ^ See "Biography" at haroldpinter.org: "Honorary degrees from the Universities of Reading 1970; Birmingham 1971; Glasgow 1974; East Anglia 1974; Stirling 1979; Brown (Rhode Island) 1982; Hull 1986; Sussex 1990; East London 1994; Sofia (Bulgaria) 1995; Bristol 1998; Goldmiths, University of London 1999; University of Aristotle, Thessaloniki 2000; University of Florence, Italy, 2001; University of Turin, Italy, 2002 and National University of Ireland, Dublin 2004...." He will be receiving the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Leeds School of English on 13 April 2007.
  47. ^ See the official website of the Serbian Academy: Members, accessed 6 Apr. 2007.
  48. ^ Further information about Artist and Citizen: 50 years of Performing Pinter is accessible on the University of Leeds conference website, as listed in the webpages of the Harold Pinter Society, where the program is announced in Events: Pinter Society Events.
  49. ^ Further details are presented on the Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing website.
  50. ^ Cf. another version of the OED cited in the BBC press release about Pinter at the BBC (10 Oct. 2002): "[']Pinteresque pin-ter-esk', adj. in the style of the characters, situations, etc., of the plays of Harold Pinter, 20th-cent. English dramatist, marked esp. by halting dialogue, uncertainty of identity, and air of menace." The "Draft Revision" (June 2005) of this entry in the Oxford English Dictionary Online (2006) is:

    Pinteresque, adj. (and n.) Brit. /pntrsk/, U.S. /pn(t)rsk/ [< the name of Harold Pinter (b. 1930), British playwright + -ESQUE suffix. Cf. PINTERISH adj.]
    Of or relating to Harold Pinter; resembling or characteristic of his plays. Also occas. as n. Pinter's plays are typically characterized by implications of threat and strong feeling produced through colloquial language, apparent triviality, and long pauses.

  51. ^ Transcribed from "Harold Pinter on Newsnight Review".
  52. ^ Harold Pinter, "On Being Awarded the German Shakespeare Prize in Hamburg" (1970), rpt. in Various Voices 39.
  53. ^ See, e.g., Sofer 29: "Asked what his plays were about, Harold Pinter once notoriously quipped, 'the weasel under the cocktail cabinet'.... Although Pinter later repudiated this remark as facetious, it does contain an important clue about his relationship to English dramatic tradition."
  54. ^ Rpt. in Various Voices 25, first published in Harold Pinter Plays One (London: Methuen, 1962); Merritt, "'Progress' and 'Fashion' in Pinter Studies", chap. 1 of Pinter in Play 15.
  55. ^ Merritt, "Contingencies of Value Judgments of Pinter's Plays", chap. 9 of Pinter in Play 217.
  56. ^ "Some Other Language Games", chap. 7 in Merritt, Pinter in Play 137-70.

[edit] References

[edit] Further resources

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

[edit] The 2005 Nobel Lecture

[edit] Additional essays and speeches by Harold Pinter

[edit] Poems by Harold Pinter

[edit] Other external links


The Plays of Harold Pinter
Plays : Ashes to Ashes, The Basement, Betrayal, The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, Celebration, The Collection, The Dumb Waiter, The Dwarfs, Family Voices, The Homecoming, The Hothouse, A Kind of Alaska, Landscape, The Lover, Moonlight, Monologue, Mountain Language, A Night Out, Night School, No Man's Land, Old Times, One for the Road, Party Time, Remembrance of Things Past (with Di Trevis), The Room, Silence, A Slight Ache, Tea Party, Voices (with James Clarke)
Sketches : Apart from That, Applicant, The Black and White, Dialogue for Three, Interview, Last to Go, The New World Order, Night, Precisely, Press Conference, Request Stop, Special Offer, That's All, That's Your Trouble, Trouble in the Works, Victoria Station
Nobel Prize in Literature: Laureates (2001- )
v • d • e

2001: Naipaul | 2002: Kertész | 2003: Coetzee | 2004: Jelinek | 2005: Pinter | 2006: Pamuk


Persondata
NAME Pinter, Harold
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION British playwright, screenwriter, poet, actor, director, author, political activist
DATE OF BIRTH October 10, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Hackney, London, England, United Kingdom
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH
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