An Indispensable Playwright Whose Name Became an Adjective

The 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded yesterday to Harold Pinter, a pioneering playwright and controversial political activist who has been one of the most important figures in British theater for almost half a century. Mr. Pinter emerged in the 1950s as one of the world’s leading playwrights, and broke through to popular success in the 1960s. The Nobel caps a long list of awards, including the Companion of Honor and honorary degrees from around the world. He is the first native Englishman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature since William Golding in 1983.The Swedish Academy cited Mr. Pinter as “the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century” and “a modern classic,” noting that, long before the Nobel, the English language itself had secured Mr. Pinter a kind of immortality: “His name enter[ed] the language as an adjective used to describe a particular atmosphere and environment in drama: ‘Pinteresque.’ “Mr. Pinter has written some 30 stage plays, as well as numerous sketches, radio and television scripts, and screenplays. The award comes in the same year that the 75-year-old, who has been battling cancer for several years, announced that he would stop writing plays. In a BBC interview in February, he said, “I think I’ve stopped writing plays now … I think it’s enough for me.” His most recent original play, “Celebration,” was produced in 2000.Harold Pinter was born in East London on October 10, 1930, the son of immigrant Jewish parents. As a child, he was evacuated from London during the German bombing campaign; the memory of this disruption, and his early experiences with anti-Semitism, were influential on his later work. His interest in the theater developed early, and he spent much of his 20s acting in provincial theater companies, under the stage name of David Baron.Mr. Pinter has continued to take small parts ever since – most recently, in films like “Mansfield Park” and “The Tailor of Panama.” He has also been an active director and writer for television, radio, and movies, producing more than 20 screenplays, including “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” and “The Last Tycoon.”The playwright’s unique theatrical voice seemed baffling when he burst on the scene in the late 1950s. His first full-length play, “The Birthday Party,” debuted in 1958 to widespread critical incomprehension, and ran for only a week. He wryly recalled a 1960 production of “The Caretaker” in Germany for which the cast “took thirty-four curtain calls, all to boos.” After a surprisingly short time, however, audiences learned to value Mr. Pinter’s challenging, darkly comic work.In recent years, Mr. Pinter has been less visible as a playwright than as a fierce critic of Anglo-American foreign policy. He opposed the Iraq war in a series of ferocious speeches and editorials, writing in 2002 of the “pervasive public nightmare – the nightmare of American hysteria, ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and belligerence.” In the same essay, he called the September 11 terrorist attacks “predictable and inevitable … an act of retaliation against constant and systematic manifestations of state terrorism on the part of America over many years, in all parts of the world.”Earlier, Mr. Pinter lent his name to the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, claiming that the genocidal Serbian dictator was no more deserving of being tried for war crimes than President Clinton. Mr. Pinter’s most recent literary work has been a series of anti-war poems, in which artistry has mattered less than sheer political certitude: “And all the dead air is alive / With the smell of America’s God,” are representative lines from his poem “God Bless America.”While the academy’s citation praises Mr. Pinter for “analysing … threat and injustice,” his early plays, far too ambiguous to be overtly political, are regarded as Mr. Pinter’s best work. The qualities of the “Pinteresque” – a blend of shabby realism, absurdist farce, and uncanny mystery, which the critic Irving Wardle influentially named the “comedy of menace” – were established in Mr. Pinter’s major plays of the 1950s and 1960s. “The Birthday Party,” “The Caretaker,” and “The Homecoming,” make use of working-class characters and settings like those favored by the Angry Young Men playwrights who brought new vitality to the British stage in the 1950s.But Mr. Pinter’s mastery of highly stylized dialogue and ambiguous action work to create an atmosphere more like Beckett and Ionesco, or even Kafka. In “The Birthday Party,” first produced in 1958, the mild-mannered Stanley is persecuted and finally driven mad by motiveless tormentors, like Joseph K. in “The Trial.” And in “The Dumb Waiter,” first produced in English in 1960, two clownish characters spend the whole play anticipating the arrival of a third, in a clear homage to “Waiting for Godot.” Beckett, in fact, was probably the largest single influence on the young Pinter, who called his predecessor laureate “the most courageous, remorseless writer going.”akirsch@nysun.com

An Indispensable Playwright Whose Name Became an Adjective

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