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'''Harold Pinter''' an English playwright, screenwriter and poet (1930-2008), whose spare and menacing dramas gave rise to the adjective Pinteresque and made him one of the most influential dramatists of the post-war theatre. His plays combine ordinary speech with threat and ambiguity, and in 2005 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

== Early Life and Career ==
Harold Pinter was born in Hackney, in the East End of London, in October 1930, the son of a Jewish tailor. He grew up in a world of working-class London, and he experienced the violence of wartime bombing and, as a young man, the atmosphere of a divided politics. These early experiences, of ordinary life shadowed by menace, gave his work its characteristic texture.

He was educated at Hackney Downs Grammar School, where an inspirational teacher encouraged his reading, and he became a professional actor, touring with repertory companies in Ireland and England through the 1950s. Acting gave him a practical knowledge of the stage and an ear for the rhythms of ordinary speech that informs every line he wrote. He continued to act throughout his life.

His first play, The Room, was written in 1957 for a student production at Bristol University and performed in London soon afterwards. It was followed by The Birthday Party in 1958, which failed at its first London performance and closed after a few nights. Only when it was revived in 1964 did it begin to be recognised as a work of major significance.

== The Early Plays and the Comedy of Menace ==
The Birthday Party established the pattern of the early Pinter plays. A group of visitors arrive at a seaside boarding house and subject the resident to a mysterious and unspecified menace, and the play ends without explanation. In such works as The Dumb Waiter, The Caretaker (1960) and The Homecoming (1965) the same mixture of comedy, threat and withheld information produced a new kind of dramatic tension.

The Caretaker, his first major commercial success, brought two brothers and a tramp into a cluttered room in which the struggle for pity and for power is conducted through oblique dialogue and casual cruelty. The Homecoming carried the method to a more disturbing extreme, its family in north London enacting a ritual of aggression and desire with a coolness that made it one of the most controversial plays of the decade.

These works were loosely grouped by critics under the label comedy of menace, and they were associated with the theatre of the absurd. Pinter himself resisted such categories, insisting that he was writing about real people and real situations, and that the uncertainty which his plays created was a reflection of the uncertainty of ordinary experience rather than a formal exercise.

== Later Plays and Political Work ==
In the later plays, beginning with Landscape and Silence in the late 1960s, Pinter turned toward memory and the failure of communication, and the menace of the early work gave way to a quieter and more elegiac note. Old Times, No Man's Land and Betrayal, with its reverse chronology of an adulterous affair, are among the finest works of this phase.

From the 1980s he wrote increasingly political plays. Mountain Language concerns the suppression of a minority tongue, and One for the Road, The New World Order and Party Time address torture, repression and the exercise of power. He also wrote the screenplay for the film The Servant and adapted many novels for the screen, including The French Lieutenant's Woman and The Handmaid's Tale.

He was active in political causes and in the movement against nuclear weapons, and his criticism of the foreign policy of the major powers made him a controversial public figure. His political campaigning and his artistic work were continuous expressions of a single conviction about the abuse of power and the evasion of truth.

== Language, Silence and Technique ==
Pinter's distinctive achievement is his use of language to reveal what it conceals. His characters talk at length in apparently trivial phrases, and beneath the surface of their talk run the real currents of threat, desire and domination. The pause and the silence, which he used with great precision, become instruments of tension, and what is not said carries as much weight as what is.

He refused to explain his plays or to supply the background that conventional drama provides. He said that he could not do more than present his characters as they appeared to him, and he objected to the demand that a play should yield a meaning that could be stated in other terms. This insistence on the autonomy of the dramatic image gives his work its openness and its continuing power to disturb.

His influence on dialogue is difficult to overstate. The evasive, colloquial yet charged conversation of the modern stage, in which characters circle one another and the unsaid dominates, descends in large part from his example, and playwrights in many languages have learned from his economy and his control.

== Influence and Legacy ==
Pinter transformed the language of the modern theatre. The Pinteresque pause and the strategic silence shaped screenwriting as well as drama, and his handling of menace and ambiguity opened possibilities of tension that the stage has since exploited. His screenplays, and his adaptations of other writers, extended his influence into the cinema.

He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005 and died in London in December 2008. His plays are performed throughout the world and are central to the repertoire of the modern theatre, and The Birthday Party, The Caretaker and Betrayal are regarded as classics. He was also a committed public campaigner who put his fame at the service of his political convictions.

He is remembered as one of the defining dramatists of the twentieth century, a writer whose small body of work changed the sound of the stage and the way in which audiences listen to it. The word Pinteresque, which entered the language during his lifetime, is a measure of how completely he stamped his voice upon the drama of his time.

== See also ==
* Theatre of the absurd
* Comedy of menace
* The Caretaker
* Nobel Prize in Literature

== References ==

<ref name="r1">Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party and Other Plays, Methuen, 1960.</ref>
<ref name="r2">Michael Billington, The Life and Work of Harold Pinter, Faber and Faber, 1996.</ref>
<ref name="r3">Mel Gussow, Conversations with Pinter, Nick Hern Books, 1994.</ref>
<ref name="r4">Martin Esslin, The Peopled Wound: The Plays of Harold Pinter, Methuen, 1970.</ref>

<references />

[[Category:Drama]]
[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:England]]

Harold Pinter - Revision history

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