PINTER, Harold

Nationality: British. Born: Hackney, London, 10 October 1930. Education: Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, 1948. Military Service: Conscientious objector. Family: Married 1) Vivien Merchant in 1956 (divorced 1980), one son; 2) Lady Antonia Fraser in 1980. Career: Poet and playwright. Has worked as a waiter, National Liberal Club; dishwasher; and salesman. Actor, using stage name David Baron, 1948-58, performing with Shakespearean repertory company, Ireland, 1950-52, with Bournemouth Repertory Company and other repertory companies, 1952-58. Since 1970 director of plays, and since 1973 associate director, National Theatre, London. Awards:Evening Standard drama award, 1961, and Newspaper Guild of New York award, 1962, both for The Caretaker; Italia prize for television play, 1963, for The Lover; two Screenwriters Guild awards, for television play and for screenplay, both 1963; New York Film Critics award, 1964, for The Servant; British Film Academy award, 1965 and 1971; New York Drama Critics Circle award, Whitbread Anglo-American Theater award, and Antoinette Perry award, all 1967, all for The Homecoming; Shakespeare prize, Hamburg, West Germany (now Germany), 1970; Writers Guild award, 1971; Best New Play award, Plays & Players, 1971, and Antoinette Perry award nomination, 1972, both for Old Times; Austrian State prize in literature, 1973; New York Drama Critics Circle award, 1980; Pirandello prize, 1980; Common Wealth award, Bank of Delaware, 1981; Elmer Holmes Bobst award for arts and letters, 1985, for drama; David Cohen British Literature prize, 1995. Honorary degrees from many institutions in the United Kingdom and the United States, including University of Reading, 1970, University of Birmingham, 1971, University of Glasgow, 1974, University of East Anglia, 1974, University of Stirling, 1979, Brown University, 1982, University of Hull, 1986, University of Sussex, 1990, University of East London, 1994, University of Sofia (Bulgaria), 1995, and an honorary fellowship from Queen Mary College, 1987. Commander, Order of the British Empire, 1966. Member: League of Dramatists; Modern Language Association (honorary fellow). Agent: Judy Daish Associates, 2 St. Charles Place, London W10 6EG, England.

PUBLICATION

Collections

The Birthday Party and Other Plays (includes The Birthday Party; The Room; The Dumb Waiter ). 1960; as The Birthday Party and The Room, 1961.

A Slight Ache and Other Plays (includes A Slight Ache; A Night Out; The Dwarfs; Trouble in the Works; The Black and White; Request Stop; Last to Go; Applicant ). 1961.

The Caretaker and The Dumb Waiter. 1961.

Three Plays: A Slight Ache, The Collection, The Dwarfs. 1962.

The Collection and The Lover (includes a prose piece, The Examination ). 1963.

The Dwarfs and Eight Review Sketches (includes The Dwarfs; Trouble in the Works; The Black and White; Request Stop; Last to Go; Applicant; Interview; That's All; That's Your Trouble ). 1965.

Tea Party and Other Plays (includes Tea Party; The Basement; Night School ). 1967.

The Lover, Tea Party, The Basement: Two Plays and a Film Script. 1967.

A Night Out, Night School, Revue Sketches: Early Plays. 1968.

Landscape and Silence (includes Landscape; Silence; Night ). 1969.

Five Screenplays (includes Accident; The Caretaker; The Pumpkin Eater; The Quiller Memorandum; The Servant ). 1971; revised edition, omitting The Caretaker and including The Go-Between, 1971.

Plays (4 vols.). 1976-81; as Complete Works, 1977-81.

The French Lieutenant's Woman and Other Screenplays (includes The French Lieutenant's Woman; Langrishe; Go Down; The Last Tycoon ). 1982.

Other Places: Three Plays (includes A Kind of Alaska; Victoria Station; Family Voices ). 1983.

Plays

The Room (produced Bristol, England, 1957; with The Dumb Waiter, London, 1960; San Francisco, 1960; with A Slight Ache, New York, 1964).

The Birthday Party: A Play in Three Acts (produced Cambridge, England, 1958; New York, 1967). 1959; second revised edition, 1981.

The Dumb Waiter (produced in German translation, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, 1959; with The Room, London, 1960; with The Collection, New York, 1962).

Trouble in the Works [and] The Black and White (produced as part of One to Another, Hammersmith, England, 1959; London, 1959).

Request Stop, Last to Go, Special Offer, [and] Getting Acquainted (produced as part of Pieces of Eight, London, 1959).

The Caretaker: A Play in Three Acts (produced London, 1960; New Haven, Connecticut, 1961; New York, 1961). 1960.

A Night Out (produced London, 1961).

A Slight Ache (London, 1961; with The Room, New York, 1964).

The Collection (produced London, 1962; with The Dumb Waiter, New York, 1962).

The Dwarfs (produced with The Lover, London, 1963; with The Dumb Waiter, New York, 1974). 1990.

The Lover (produced with The Dwarfs, London, 1963; New York, 1964).

The Homecoming: A Play in Two Acts (produced Cardiff, Wales, England, 1965; London, 1965; New York, 1967). 1965; revised edition, 1968.

Tea Party (produced with The Basement, New York, 1968). 1965.

The Basement (produced with Tea Party, New York, 1968).

Landscape (radio play). 1968.

Night (produced as part of We Who Are about To …, London, 1969).

Landscape [and] Silence (produced London, 1969; New York, 1970).

Sketches (produced New York, 1969).

Old Times (produced London, 1971; New York, 1971). 1971.

Monologue (television play). 1973.

No Man's Land (produced London, 1975). 1975.

Betrayal (produced London, 1978; New York, 1980). 1978; revised edition, 1980.

Other Pinter Pauses (revue; produced New York, 1979).

The Hothouse (produced London, 1980; New York, 1982). 1980; revised edition, 1982.

Family Voices: A Play for Radio (produced London, 1981). 1981.

The French Lieutenant's Woman (screenplay). As The French Lieutenant's Woman: A Screenplay, 1981.

A Kind of Alaska: A Play (produced London, 1982). 1981.

Victoria Station. 1982.

Other Places (triple bill, includes Family Voices, A Kind of Alaska, and Victoria Station; produced London, 1982). 1982; revised edition, omitting Family Voices and including One for the Road, 1983 (produced New York, 1984; London, 1985).

Precisely (sketch; produced as part of The Big One, London, 1983).

One for the Road: A Play (produced Hammersmith, 1984). 1984; revised edition, 1985.

Mountain Language (produced London, 1988; with The Birthday Party, New York, 1989). 1988.

Party Time & The New World Order. 1993. Moonlight: A Play. 1993.

Ashes to Ashes. 1996.

Celebration (produced with The Room, New York, 2001).

Screenplays:

The Servant, 1963; The Guest, adaptation of his The Caretaker, 1964; The Pumpkin Eater, 1964; The Quiller Memorandum, 1967; Accident, 1967; The Birthday Party, 1968; The Go-Between, 1971; The Homecoming, 1971; The Last Tycoon, 1975; The French Lieutenant's Woman, 1981; Betrayal, 1983; Turtle Diary, 1986; The Handmaid's Tale, adaptation of the novel by Margaret Atwood, 1990; Lolita, 1997. Also adapted Fred Uhlman's novel Reunion, 1989.

Television Plays:

Night School, 1960; The Collection, 1961; The Lover, 1963; Tea Party, 1965; The Basement, 1967; Pinter People, 1968; Monologue, 1973.

Radio Plays:

A Slight Ache, 1959; A Night Out, 1960; The Dwarfs, 1960; Dialogue for Three, 1964; That's Your Trouble, 1964; That's All, 1964; Applicant, 1964; Interview, 1964; Landscape, 1968; Family Voices: A Play for Radio, 1981.

Poetry

Poems. 1968.

Poems and Prose 1949-1977. 1978; revised edition, as Collected Poems and Prose, 1986.

I Know the Place: Poems. 1979.

Ten Early Poems. 1990.

Collected Poems and Prose. 1996.

Other

The Compartment, with Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco (unreleased screenplay). Published in Project 1, 1963.

Mac. 1968.

The Proust Screenplay: A la recherche du temps perdu, with Joseph Losey and Barbara Bray. 1978.

The Heat of the Day. 1989.

Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics. 1998.

Editor, with John Fuller and Peter Redgrove, New Poems 1967: A P.E.N. Anthology. 1968.

Editor, with Geoffrey Godbert and Anthony Astbury, A Hundred Poems by a Hundred Poets: An Anthology. 1986.

Editor, with Godbert and Astbury, Ninety-Nine Poems in Translation: An Anthology. 1994.

Bibliography:

Harold Pinter: An Annotated Bibliography by Steven H. Gale, 1978.

Critical Studies:

Harold Pinter by Walter Kerr, 1967; "' … Apart from the Known and the Unknown': The Unreconciled Worlds of Harold Pinter's Characters" by Francis Gillen, in Arizona Quarterly, 26(1), Spring 1970, pp. 17-24; "Harold Pinter: Action and Control: The Homecoming and Other Plays" by John Russell Brown, in his Theatre Language: A Study of Arden, Osborne, Pinter and Wesker, 1972; "Who Can Afford to Live in the Past?: The Homecoming" by William Baker and Stephen Ely Tabachnick, in their Harold Pinter, 1973; "Pinter As a Radio Dramatist" by Mary Jane Miller, in Modern Drama, XVII(4), December 1974, pp. 403-12; "A Pattern of Need" by Steven H. Gale, in his Butter's Going Up: A Critical Analysis of Harold Pinter's Work, 1977; "Harold Pinter: A Retrospect" by Peter Thomson, in Critical Quarterly, 20(4), Winter 1978, pp. 21-28; Pinter the Playwright by Martin Esslin, 1984; The Pinter Ethic: The Erotic Aesthetic by Penelope Prentice, 1994; Harold Pinter: A Question of Timing by Martin S. Regal, 1995; Understanding Harold Pinter by Ronald Knowles, 1995..

Theatrical Activities:

Actor: Plays—several of his own plays.

* * *

At the end of the twentieth century Harold Pinter was generally acknowledged as Britain's finest living playwright. He was born on 11 October 1930 in the East End of London, the son of a Jewish tailor. Following World War II he experienced a rise in anti-Semitic activity in London and politically classified himself as a conscientious objector opposed to performing military service for his country. At the age of 19 he dropped out of college and began a career as an actor in a touring Shakespearean company in Ireland.

Pinter's playwriting career began with a one-act play, The Room (1957), in which he explored some of the themes and styles that would become associated with his later work. It is a mysterious play about a middle-aged woman, Rose, who anxiously dwells in a room with her brutal, racist younger husband and who is commanded by a blind black stranger to remember the past. In this play and in others Pinter uses a circuitous structure that shies from specific explanation, preferring to make its points through implication. An early critic and biographer, Martin Esslin, described Pinter's plays as comedies of menace, in which protagonists are filled with anxiety, awaiting some brutal downfall. Many of his plays and film scripts also explore marriages and friendships as states of persecution, as competitions over memory, and as contests for language. Control or power becomes the central motivating force in human interchanges; whoever controls the language controls memory and controls both the present and the future.

These themes have been consistently present from The Birthday Party (1958) and The Dumb Waiter (1959) through The Caretaker (1960), The Homecoming (1965), Old Times (1971), and No Man's Land (1975). Pinter earlier eschewed precise political readings of his plays, preferring ambiguity to statement, even though his plays were peppered with clues. In the 1980s, however, he began openly expressing his political views in such works as One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), The New World Order (1993), and Ashes to Ashes (1996). Again, Pinter has shied away from specifically identifying his plays, especially as Holocaust or post-Holocaust theater. While the subject of Mountain Language— an ethnic group is denied not only all political rights but also its own language—was inspired by the actions of Turkey against its Kurd population, the play's unstated locale also allows the reader or viewer to infer the condition of Jews under the Third Reich in the 1930s and 1940s. Likewise, Ashes to Ashes utilizes images from the Jewish experience of being selected at railway stations, separations of families, and large groups being led to their deaths while carrying their personal belongings.

In only one script, his screen adaptation of Fred Uhlman's novel Reunion (1989), has Pinter directly confronted the Holocaust. In the script an elderly Jewish-American businessman named Henry Strauss returns to the Germany of his youth, where he lived before he was sent away by his parents to escape the escalating anti-Semitic violence of the 1930s. While he is in his hotel room, he watches a film clip of Laurence Olivier as Henry V giving the Saint Crispin's day speech to his troops. Henry's issue is the necessity for those who were present at the event to remember the past, a remembrance challenged by a television intellectual contesting the king's sincerity. Yet Strauss's visit to his childhood home is predicated on his need to confront his own conflicting memories and to discover what has happened to a former childhood friend who had abandoned him for the Nazis.

Pinter's place within Holocaust literature may be found in his exploration of the modes of persecution and in his analysis of the uses of language and its ability to control the past by refashioning memory. Although he did not personally experience the loss of the Holocaust, he has continued, with considerable power and imagination, to open discussion on these issues to a post-Holocaust generation.

—Steven Dedalus Burch

See the essay on Ashes to Ashes.